There is only fear. It is, however, highly contagious.
I am going skiing. I will be sure to wear a face mask. You never know. I could catch it from a wandering moose.
Author: Mark Tokarski
Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.
Perhaps it is not evil, just stupid
I was xc skiing today and had time to think and reflect. I think they key here is the conference held in NYC in October … see posts below. Suppose these are real people, and not spooks, but people who believe that we can have a virus pandemic, having studied Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain) and Stephen King (The Stand). If that is the case, they want to test our preparedness and measure the fallout of such a pandemic. So they decide, with government approvals around the world, to run a drill. News media, as always is compliant.
The face of news
This video came to mind as I saw all the news readers out there pushing the Coronavirus hoax. They are not scholars. They are not “journalists,” if that word has meaning. They are hired because they are good looking and seem trustworthy and can be taught to read a teleprompter. Example follows, well known, but worth another look.
Hobgoblinvirus
“We’ll know our disinformation program complete when everything the American public believes is false.”(William Casey, Director of CIA for eight years under President Reagan)*
The above quote came to mind as I looked about me seeing the stampede that Coronavirus has become. It reminded me of another quote:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” (HL Mencken)
That in mind, the virus should be renamed “hobgoblinvirus.”
I am writing this post to link to AB over at Fakeologist, who has been doing really good work on this hoax. I am not going to reinvent the wheel, just comment briefly on what he has brought us so far.
Alphabetic nonsense
The above photo is the final of a girls’ 55 meter dash at Bloomfield High School in Connecticut. The two people finishing first and second are Terry Miller (second from left) and Andraya Yearwood, far left. They both have (or had) penises. Their bodies are obviously those of male athletes. The three who finished after them on the right are obviously girls. Boys are generally better athletes than girls.
Three youths with vaginas and their families have initiated a lawsuit in federal court to prevent boys who think they are girls from competing in events that should be restricted to girls. Says Yearwood,
“I have known two things for most of my life: I am a girl and I love to run. There is no shortage of discrimination that I face as a young Black woman who is transgender. I have to wake up every day in a world where people who look like me face so many scary and unfair things. I am lucky to live in a state that protects my rights and to have a family that supports me. This is what keeps me going.”
A word to the wise … commenting, enough of the negative energy
I am not going to name names here, as you know who you are. Well, I will name one, Dick Mustard Q, who is Gaia [Gaia denies this, meaning we have a new psychopath onboard], and who is gone. But for the others, you are being much too confrontational and “right all the time.” This doesn’t bother me personally, as I am “Administrator” and offensive comments never see light of day with me. But other writers are “editors” and have to endure a slot of shit before they finally complain to me and I ban the source of the nonsense.
Continue reading “A word to the wise … commenting, enough of the negative energy”
Coronavirus is an opportunity for investors
I generally have no time for TV “doctors” who go by their first name, Dr. Phil, for instance, a total fraud, and here, Dr. Drew. So I listened reluctantly and then with pleasant surprise as he told the members of a TV panel that the press needs to shut up about Cornonavirus. It’s a mild respiratory infection that has probably infected hundreds of thousands of us. Thanks to people like Michael Crichton and Stephen King, we are always on the lookout for a pandemic that is going to kill half of us.
Continue reading “Coronavirus is an opportunity for investors”
What of this “Trust” Fund?
Note to readers: Someone in comments below mentioned the widely misunderstood Social Security Trust Fund. I am somewhat a wonk, and have written about such matters. (I realize that issues of aging have limited appeal, which is why I asked the younger Fauxlex aboard, to write about issues with broader appeal.) Rather than rewrite the piece on the Trust Fund, I am simply re-dating it. If all goes according to plan, it should appear below with the original comment thread intact. From 6/26/2018:
The above image is making the rounds on Facebook. Later in this post I will talk about the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” and how it never was and never will be. For now I want to thank my friend Kevin for putting up his post directly below called A Crashing Success, as it offers an easy and early escape from this post about (cue violin screech) … taxes!!!
Go now, quickly, or prepare to be flooded with the conceptual abstractions that are used to justify the theft of our hard-earned money. The words “hard-earned” are important, as there are other forms of wealth that are easily owned by people who by pure chance slid down the right birth canals – trust funds, stocks and bonds, inherited wealth and Cayman bank accounts. The essential feature of taxation is that hard-earned money is heavily taxed, while the birth-canal funds are only lightly touched, if at all, by the IRS.
So journey with me now beneath the fold, or make your escape. The particular tax I am going to write about has a name you might know, one that sounds like a disease or the claw of a wild beast. It is called … “FICA.” From that word springs the myth of something called a “Trust Fund.”
Attention Senior Citizens – have your grandchild read this to you
We senior citizens are noted for two things, diminishing physical and mental abilities. We cannot do much about the former except exercise, what I call “running from Father Time.” It is loss of mental capacity that keeps the advertising industry interested in us. Senior citizens have to be the reason for the waves of robocalls that are torturing all of us. They only need a <1% response to make money, given their low overhead. Shame on us! We are the reason your phone is always ringing.
Every year, during a 45-day period known as “open enrollment” (OE), we seniors are deluged with mailings from members of AHIP, “American’s Health Insurance Providers,” trying to lure us into a program called “Medicare Advantage.” I bit, one time, but was able to escape the grips of Humana by complaining directly to Medicare about its deceitful practices. I re-entered Medicare last June. I now ask myself this: “I spent the first 65 years of my life trying to get away from health insurance companies. Why would I voluntarily go back to them?”
The answer, of course, is diminished mental capacity.
Continue reading “Attention Senior Citizens – have your grandchild read this to you”
Fickle foehn fallacies
I was out birding with a group of folks on Saturday, out on the South Platte River northeast of Denver. In terms of quacks seen, it was a spectacular day, with thousands of birds covering fourteen species along with bald eagles, hawks, cormorants and herons. And smaller stuff. It helps that a major waste treatment plant dumps its final product in the Platte upstream … it both warms the water and adds nutrients. The vast majority of ducks we saw were Northern Shovelers, known to like brackish water.
Such a day makes up for my weak outing on the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, where a friend and I walked for several hours through woods, not seeing one bird. At the outset we saw two crows flying high overhead, and I reported them only to be told they were ravens.
“So,” I told our group leader, “I saw two birds this afternoon, and got them both wrong.”
