How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
While in Washington, DC, we had a couple meals at a restaurant called Busboys and Poets. What a trip! It was right out of my life years ago, when freshly sprung from my right-wing Catholic conservative upbringing, I did what I called “the bounce”. Assuming my prior life had misled me about everything, I discovered there was a left, and assumed I would find some truth over there.
Continue reading “Stumbling into the past: A left wing enclave in a DC restaurant”
That’s the best I can do for a photo from the back set of our Uber. How unfortunate! We are in Washington, DC for one day, and it happens to be at the same time as a two-day visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. That’s not something we care about, but it means that they have blockaded side streets in the area of Reagan Airport down to where we are staying. Our poor Uber driver was patient, but totally frustrated at almost standstill traffic. It took 90 minutes to get to our hotel, a trip that should have lasted 30. Each intersection was blockaded to prevent side street traffic, and had high barrier fences across to allow only one car at a time. What nonsense! Such a frightened way of life.
I have lamented at times that people in this land do not know how to read and interpret graphs. Indeed, some can be confusing and intimidating. Take, for instance, this one, called the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which is maintained by NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, just down the road from us in Boulder.
“Covid was a multi-trillion dollar worldwide Psyop meant to see how much they can control us. That’s why people dislike me… because I don’t give a shit. I’m going to tell the truth.”
“Governments, media, tech platforms, and pharmaceutical companies all moved in lockstep. Billions were spent. Dissent was punished. Questions were treated as moral failures. The goal wasn’t public health. It was to measure how quickly people would surrender their judgment, their jobs, their kids’ education, and their right to say “no.”
“85% of people complied. They took the shots, accepted the mandates, and then acted shocked when the same institutions that sold them certainty started walking it back. A lot of them still can’t admit it was a test of compliance. They’d rather keep calling people like me dangerous than look at the data, the lab-leak evidence, the shifting narratives, or the damage done to kids and small businesses.”
“That’s why some people still hate me. Not because of football. Because I wouldn’t play along. I said I was immunized when I meant I had my own protocol. I refused the product. I called Fauci what he is. I pointed out that a captured media and a captured public-health apparatus don’t get to lecture anyone about “the science.” And I’m not going to start lying now just because it’s easier.”
“I don’t give a shit about the cost. I’m going to tell the truth. The experiment happened. Most people failed it. A smaller group noticed in real time and refused to pretend otherwise. That’s the only scoreboard that still matters.” (Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers)
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” (Albert Einstein)
The above quote is actually “attributed” to Einstein, as he did not say such a thing in those words. In as similar fashion, the Mark Twain quote in the upper right of this blog, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled” is merely attributed to him. He did write, says AI, in 1906: “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” I have tried now for years to substitute the real quote for the attributed one, but WordPress will not allow it.
It’s OK, however. It is the content of the words rather than to person that matters. Using famous people like Einstein and Twain adds gravitas to words, but the words themselves carry enough truth that no further adornment is needed. The whole of the quotation business is a small industry with various agencies mining each one to get to its source, admirable work, in my view.
I have had an exchange now with Michael Booth, who writes for the Colorado Sun, and I think it is at an end. I quoted his article Climate Change in Colorado extensively. I have found Mr. Booth to be, as I suspected, smart, young, genuine, and a product of the education system such as it is. I won’t quote him, as his article (March of 2026) is a fair representation of his attitude and point of view, and I don’t have permission outside of that to use his words. However, his private words do not do any disservice to either him or his article. He’s a nice young man.
Continue reading “Climate Change: Not real, not spectacular”
I first
knew the name Annie Dillard through Edward Abbey. I read everything he wrote, except for his fiction, which I did not like. He wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, and due to that was adopted as a mascot by Earth First!, s false-front environmental group used to discredit true conservationists. I doubt that Ed knew he was being used, but in his shoes I probably would have seized on the added publicity too. He lived on book sales royalties, and it was not much. As I recall, he sold the rights to MRG for a nice sum, but that book is still waiting to be made into a movie.
I read MRG and then avoided all of his other fiction. His characters were too clever and overwrought, and there was just too much self-destructiveness within it. The idea was that a new breed of environmentalist would step forward, and start doing destruction of projects that were anti-nature. The big one in Abbey’s time was the Glen Canyon Dam, a water project built in the 1950s over the objections of then true-to-heart conservationists. Abbey and others would take time to paddle what would later become the catchment area for Lake Powell. His writing about that and other natural wonders of the Western United States, especially the deserts, is why I read it all, everything he wrote, except the fiction.
David Brower (1912-2000) came out in favor of Glen Canyon, which I think went a long way in helping the project go forward. He was prominent and well-known at that time. His words carried weight. Later Brower would express regret that he came out as he did. To me, suspicious Sam, it told me that Brower, like Earth First!, was false-front. That’s pretty common in the environmental movement.
(Note) Original email changed significantly from the original post.
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Just when I think I’ve run out of things to write about, along comes an unexpected trivial delight, a small item in a small newspaper that turned out to be a Readers’ Digest version of a much longer piece published in a more widely read journal, though I do not know about the “widely read” attribution.
The Canyon Courier is a small local tabloid here in the Denver foothills, and is part of a larger chain of such publications. It has an editor, Scott Taylor, whom I suspect holds that title for CC and perhaps other tabloids. Is there enough work in the one to justify a salaried title?
Canyon Courier offers some local news, utterly predictable op-eds, a fun weekly column satirizing local sheriff reports, and local sports. The latter is filler and of no interest beyond parents, but a requirement for all newspapers. The Denver Post does the same thing, calling its local sports trivia the Denver Broncos, Colorado Rockies, Denver Nuggets, and Colorado Avalanche. Such filler regularly leaks onto the front page.
As it happens, Mr. Taylor was, I suspect, short of content for his September 7 issue. He had previously exposed himself to me as a climate alarmist, which is vogue in journalism, where “climate skeptics” (“deniers”) are offered no ink. He linked to a real estate blog, Real Estate Today by Jim Smith, which has three followers. Smith does the proper duty of linking to the original Colorado Sun piece linked below, by Michael Booth. It was obvious to me that neither Taylor nor Smith actually read the Booth piece. They just clipped part of it, copying 7-800 words out of 6,155. Tldr.
Booth is listed as environment writer, co-author of a health newsletter, and a podcast. He has no scientific background, only journalism. I do not genuflect there.
So, me being me, read the Colorado Sun Booth piece, yellow highlighter in hand, and emailed my reactions to Taylor, Smith, and Booth. That email follows beneath the fold. It won’t be read by any of the email recipients, c‘est la vie. It’s just a blend of Booth’s words and my words. If he reads at all, it will be a skim. After all, he is a climate alarmist, and those people go straight to print in our news media, unedited. Climate “deniers” are shut out, as befits a propaganda movement.
Of all the instruments in an orchestra, my favorite is the oboe. Its sound haunts me, and perhaps as in the screen grab above, has the same effects on the clarinetist sitting next to the oboist in the London Symphony Orchestra. And, perhaps as you read this and think I am going to write about classical music, you’ve decided that you’ve better things to do.
I’ll be brief. The oboist is playing part of Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, second movement, a beautiful haunting piece. I recognized it instantly as I flipped on my iPad this morning. I tried to save it but could not. It only wants to show the entire video, and take you to Facebook in the process. You’re on your own.
I first came upon this piece of music years ago in a piano piece by Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, used by the producers of the TV series Bosch. In the episode a young boy had died before his time, and as the piano music, called “Goin’Home“, played, two detectives were informing the mother of her son’s death, and Harry Bosch uncovering the body at the morgue. The emotion that the piece invoked was overwhelming. I sent away for the CD on which Haden and Jones*** played it, and a couple of months later it arrived from England. The entire CD consisted of that piece and familiar religious compositions, none of which appealed to me. But I hung on to Goin’ Home piece because of its powerful evocative quality. Later I learned that the piece was played at FDR’s funeral, during a time when the whole nation was in mourning. (Have I ever written about FDR faking his death? All of the hallmarks of a fake presidential death are there, but I’ve never had the energy to write it up.)
I put the lyrics to the piece at the end here for anyone interested, as it was written to be a Negro spiritual. Lovely though they are, I think the lyrics ruin the music.
Continue reading “Musings, what is to become of this blog, and other more important stuff”
I want to be dispassionate about this … nothing personal. In the larger scheme, people like me do not have impact. One only need glance at how much coverage, how many hits, a figure like, say, Madonna receives to understand how the mass media controls the public mind. I wrote recently about Eva Peron and her daughter, Madonna Ciccone, and my visits on this blog soared from less than 500 on a good day to over 6,000. Then they plummeted again.
Why did that happen? Word of mouth probably. Eva Peron (Madonna Ciccone nee Fortin, “Evita”) is so far removed that hardly anyone knows, much less cares, of her. Madonna, on the other hand, her daughter, is still cranking along. Eva was once First Lady of Argentina in the early 50s, and during the recent final of the FIFA world cup between Argentina and England, who should be featured during intermission but the 68-year-old pop star, Madonna Ciccone! . Whaaaaat? Was Che Guevara not available?
This is not about that. This is about censorship, and not about me personally getting roughed up by it. It is about the extent to which it goes on, and how utterly effective it is. I’ll go back to 2020 and the Scamdemic, and Facebook and Youtube and Nextdoor, three outlets that get heavy traffic, the last, less so but still managed from high above with eyes on all activity. Each outlet made it clear that there would be allowed no criticism of the World Health Organization (WHO) or of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Nextdoor even announced on a banner headline that any comments critical of either agency would be immediately removed.
Sometimes in arguing about this and that, we are reduced to absurdity by official truth: The view of the sky from the Moon was total blackness. Yes, I know, we are told that the cameras used by the astronauts had to be shielded from intense light and so were f-stopped down so that the surface was visible while the stars invisible. But honestly, folks, you would think that one or two of the guys who walked there would have said “Holy shit, Batman! It’s beautiful beyond belief! We gotta get a photo before we leave!”
The above image is said to be taken from the surface of Mars, and a commenter or two has noticed that Moon pictures are oddly lacking a night sky. OK, it’s NASA. They claim to have landed a rover on Mars, Curiosity, and this is the view. The panoramic view has all the colors of the rainbow, and I only grabbed what looked real, and I don’t buy all those colors, obviously doctored. This by itself is reward enough, if if is real. A big IF, as always with NASA. But we have all seen doctored images from Hubble, so we know it is amazing once we get out of Earth’s atmosphere, even after the Hubble doctors do their graphics.
