Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Using aborted baby parts in medical research

Can you really trust science and scientists? Recent revelations by the Center for Medical Progress show how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system. BREAKING: University of Pittsburgh ADMITS Hearts Beating While Harvesting Aborted Infants’ Kidneys – The Center for Medical Progress I looked through the NIH forms for the grants to use baby parts for medical research and wondered about the long chain of experts, from language to enumeration to composing the agreements between NIH and University of Pittsburgh (and I'm sure many others). If I read this correctly, there is great care in assuring that the lab animals received "humane" care. Too bad the babies didn't.




Here's what it reads like in medical, sanitized, safe jargon (I've removed the footnote numbers, but those lead you to other studies): "Humanized mouse models with human fetal-derived hematopoietic system and autologous lymphoid tissues are well-established. Additionally, full-thickness human fetal skin readily engrafts onto immunodeficient mice and develops into adult-like skin due to its high regenerative capability. Furthermore, human fetal skin exhibits low levels of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) I and II expression, which results in reduced immunogenicity compared to adult skin. Thus, human fetal-derived tissues and cells provide a feasible means to develop a humanized mouse model with autologous human skin and immune system."

For longer term studies, rats are used: "Evidence also suggests that nude rats support engraftment and development of full-thickness neonatal foreskin." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71548-z

Fixing little leaks

I cut and pasted this from Joan Shaw Turrentine's post and she got it from the Facebook page “Christians Laughing.”
 
A man was asked to paint a boat. He brought his paint and brushes and began to paint the boat a bright red, as the owner asked him.

While painting, he noticed a small hole in the hull, and quietly repaired it.

When he finished painting, he received his money and left.

The next day, the owner of the boat came to the painter and presented him with a nice check, much higher than the payment for painting.

The painter was surprised and said “You've already paid me for painting the boat Sir!”

“But this is not for the paint job. It's for repairing the hole in the boat.”

“Ah! But it was such a small service... certainly it's not worth paying me such a high amount for something so insignificant.”

“My dear friend, you do not understand. Let me tell you what happened:

“When I asked you to paint the boat, I forgot to mention the hole.

“When the boat dried, my kids took the boat and went on a fishing trip.

“They did not know that there was a hole. I was not at home at that time.

“When I returned and noticed they had taken the boat, I was desperate because I remembered that the boat had a hole.

“Imagine my relief and joy when I saw them returning from fishing.

“Then, I examined the boat and found that you had repaired the hole!

“You see, now, what you did? You saved the life of my children! I do not have enough money to pay your 'small' good deed.”

So no matter who, when or how, continue to help, sustain, wipe tears, listen attentively, and carefully repair all the 'leaks' you find. You never know when one is in need of us, or when God holds a pleasant surprise for us to be helpful and important to someone.

Along the way, you may have repaired numerous 'boat holes' for several people without realizing how many lives you've save. 

Make a difference....be the best you can be ...

Have a blessed day

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Judging polices on intentions rather than results

We have so many "feel good" policies that drain us dry, and should be a warning, but our leaders never learn, and perhaps the citizen-voters don't either. Virtually every transfer of wealth program in the War on Poverty failed a the macro level, and struggled at the micro. Like Head Start. The government's own studies at year 50 showed almost no advantaged for the thousands invested in each child. But it feels good, hope never dies, and the program will continue to be a bloated, over-sold, under achieving with good intentions so you can get back to your nice life. These programs make politicians wealthy, they get them reelected. These programs provide millions of jobs for the middle class bureaucrats and their staff who run them, from the grant writers, to suppliers and operators, to social workers to the low income who are hired in to staff them.

This article is 22 years old--but not much has changed. https://fee.org/articles/why-the-war-on-poverty-failed/

I remember the Harrington book that launched LBJ's war. I was so excited we could end poverty in my life time. However, the standard for poverty simply went up to accommodate a perpetual lower class. Then we went to "gap" instead of material wealth. Or looked at ZIP codes. Then we judged all by race, color and ethnicity, not actual need. And in all the administrations since LBJ, only the Trump years made an actual, real dent and improved the lives of millions without robbing Peter to pay Paul. And that was just too scary for leaders of both parties--loss of power, sound the alarms!




"The welfare state is self-perpetuating. By undermining the social norms necessary for self-reliance, welfare creates a need for even greater assistance in the future. President Obama plans (2014) to spend $13 trillion over the next decade on welfare programs that will discourage work, penalize marriage and undermine self-sufficiency."

And scholars will always disagree. The Accomplishments and Lessons of the War on Poverty | Scholars Strategy Network

Thursday, August 05, 2021

Where are the workers?

Yet still Joe Biden pretends he needs to "save" Trump's booming economy with inflationary government goosing.

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg reports: [From the Wall St. Journal]

Small businesses continue to struggle to find workers to fill open positions. Forty-nine percent (seasonally adjusted) of all owners reported job openings they could not fill in the current period, up 3 points from June and a record high reading. Unfilled job openings have remained far above the 48-year historical average of 22 percent.

Overall, 61 percent reported hiring or trying to hire in July, down 2 points from June. The issue will be whether the supply of labor will cooperate. Owners’ plans to fill open positions remain at high levels, with a seasonally adjusted net 27 percent planning to create new jobs in the next three months, down 1 point from June’s record high reading.

Operating almost like a law of physics, a labor shortage naturally and reliably motivates employers to increase the incentive for employees and potential employees to show up for work. Mr. Dunkelberg reports:

Seasonally adjusted, a net 38 percent reported raising compensation, down 1 point from June’s record high of 39 percent. A net 27 percent plan to raise compensation in the next three months, up 1 point from June and a 48-year record high reading. There is little an owner can do to attract needed employees other than offer higher compensation."  Where Are the Workers? - WSJ

Wall St. Journal, "Where are the workers?" Aug. 5, 2021





TB vaccine is 100 years old--and it's not 100%; and flu season is coming

 Although we have the BCG vaccine for TB, it isn't 100% and other public health measures are necessary to control the disease. Killing nearly 1.5 million people in 2019, it stood as the leading global cause of death from an infectious pathogen, according to the World Health Organization. Do not expect the Covid vaccine to be perfect or 100%.

 Bile and Potatoes, 1921 | The Scientist Magazine® (the-scientist.com)

Although masks don't provide much protection against Covid19, they really help during flu season. I plan to mask up for that. And the flu will probably be baaaack with a vengeance this fall and winter.
"In the United States alone, influenza viruses cause hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of fatalities each year. During the pandemic, however, a drastic change occurred: there was a precipitous drop in infections with influenza and other respiratory viruses—and in some parts of the world, some of these pathogens are nowhere to be found.

. . . Mask wearing, social distancing, and other restrictions implemented to stave off SARS-CoV-2 are thought to be the primary culprits in the decline in other respiratory pathogens in circulation. As such measures are lifted, though, scientists are expecting the missing viruses to return—and are pondering what will happen when that occurs. " The Pandemic Crushed the Flu--What Happens When It Returns? | The Scientist Magazine® (the-scientist.com)

Who controls the information that is supporting your beliefs and values?

There are many ways to interpret statistics for this lockdown, and this is just one of them--Case Fatality Rate--CFR. It is the political slant of the writer which determines which is selected. I'm a conservative Christian, so CFR supports many of my points. The Case Fatality Rate for the seasonal flu is about .1% to .2%.  That's higher than the CFR for Covid19.  By age, Covid19 looks very bad, unless you realize many or even most, of the people who were/are most at risk (in China it is 20%) are not in the labor force, and not in school. So why were the schools and the economy shut down?⁠

Most of the fatalities had co-morbidities. So why was the health system which managed those diseases for us put in peril? See the other methods at Ourworldindata.org to find the figures that match your level of fear and anxiety, your politics and your list to the left or right so you can be better informed than the Facebook and Google fact checkers and the Washington Post.

I'm a retired academic librarian (Slavic studies, Latin American studies, agriculture, veterinary medicine over the course of 25 years) and although I've forgotten a lot, I do remember well that to the victor belong the archives. Whoever controls the information controls what you are allowed to know, even in your public library. And keep in mind that public librarians are 223:1, liberal to conservative, higher than the ACLU.   And right now, that is Big Tech. If they can shut down the most powerful man on the globe, the President of the United States, imagine how they can crush us!

Note: Case fatality rate, also called case fatality risk or case fatality ratio, in epidemiology, the proportion of people who die from a specified disease among all individuals diagnosed with the disease over a certain period of time. Case fatality rate typically is used as a measure of disease severity and is often used for prognosis (predicting disease course or outcome), where comparatively high rates are indicative of relatively poor outcomes. It also can be used to evaluate the effect of new treatments, with measures decreasing as treatments improve. Case fatality rates are not constant; they can vary between populations and over time, depending on the interplay between the causative agent of disease, the host, and the environment as well as available treatments and quality of patient care.

Case fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of deaths from a specified disease over a defined period of time by the number of individuals diagnosed with the disease during that time; the resulting ratio is then multiplied by 100 to yield a percentage. This calculation differs from that used for mortality rate, another measure of death for a given population. Although number of deaths serves as the numerator for both measures, mortality rate is calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the population at risk during a certain time frame. As a true rate, it estimates the risk of dying of a certain disease. Hence, the two measures provide different information. (Britannica)

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Who and what is science? Who can you trust?

Most of you who lived through the tobacco cancer linked investigations and pay outs of the 1990s, would react with shock if you were told to trust R. J. Reynolds "science" about lung disease and smoking today. And that's about how unbiased today's scientists are who are taking money from the federal government (NIH) to investigate the novel virus currently causing the lockdowns and mask orders. Even if the NIH funded scientists are not publishing in that field, they will be shut out of research on immune system, or ivermectin or HCQ as a tool in fighting a global pandemic. If they appear as expert witnesses on a cable show or podcast, they risk their careers and funding if their conclusions don't support Big Pharma, CDC and WHO. The host who books them or interviews them, risks being deplatformed or their monetization contract. 

Trust the "science?" No, follow the money.

Friday, July 30, 2021

Exercise in the afternoon? I'm ready for a nap

Afternoon exercise instead of morning? I'm ready for a nap!

"Exercise training elicits superior metabolic effects when performed in the afternoon compared to morning in metabolically compromised humans." https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.14814/phy2.14669?

"Compared to participants who trained in the morning, participants who trained in the afternoon experienced superior beneficial effects of exercise training on insulin-stimulated peripheral glucose disposal, insulin-mediated suppression of adipose tissue lipolysis, fasting plasma glucose levels, exercise performance, and fat mass. In addition, exercise training in the afternoon also tended to elicit superior effects on basal hepatic glucose output."

Well, I'm not metabolically compromised, I hope.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Obesity and discrimination

Someone sent me a link about obesity by Theodore Dalrymple. There was a paywall, so I didn't read it, but wondered--was she telling me something? Bob and I are both 30 pounds heavier than when we met in 1959.

So I did a search, "Dalrymple obesity" and see there are over a decade of articles by him, each just as alarming as the previous. It seems one is no longer "obese" but "has obesity." That's an important language change. It's a disease in the new medical speak, he says (he doesn't seem to agree with that language). Now it's a pandemic larger than the one we're in right now and accounts for a high death rate. And over 2 billion (in 2014) globally have this disease. It used to be a disease of the rich, but now it's a disease of the poor.
 
Dalrymple, a physician, admits he's prejudiced toward personal responsibility. He's balanced enough to point out evidence going a different direction, like a study on antibiotics which is so much more common in the last 50 years, particularly given to children. Something similar has often occurred to me--we consume an alarming amount of medicines, supplements, toxins, and chemicals that produce a stew that probably isn't fit for human consumption--the fluoride in water for tooth decay to zinc oxide for skin protection to antibiotics in the meat. And there must be hundreds of examples. I take 2 prescriptions for my heart and one for my bones, then I toss down non-prescription fish oil for my bursitis (it works), calcium for my bones, and Vit. B complex for my brain health (not sure that's working). Your mileage will vary.

However, whether obesity is a "have" or an "is", overweight people of every ethnic group, sex, age, and race face serious discrimination and bullying everyday. I believe it is far worse than racial discrimination and because it affects both health and careers, existing or new laws and regulations don't stop it. There have been advocates, support groups and ad campaigns, urging the non-obese who are now the minority to just be kind, nice, and non-prejudiced, but so far I don't see it working.
 
So while the jury is out on the cause of 73.6% of Americans being either overweight or obese, it's everyone's responsibility to be kinder and stop the discrimination. No rioting or culture cancelling necessary.

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Thoughts on Cuba

Why now, Cuba? First, when Castro took over they were propped up by the USSR. Then when it collapsed they turned to Venezuela which Cuba had infected with Communism. In turn it collapsed and Cuba lost again in the game of dictators. Both countries lost enormously in the exodus of its middle and upper class. When tourism finally came back to Cuba under Obama's circumventing the law, the pandemic soon followed. Supported by relatives in the U.S. for decades with remittances (billions), the Cuban government and its lackeys and apologists in the U.S. media and the Democrat party, the people have said, ENOUGH. Is it too late?

We could learn from Cuba and Venezuela, but will we? We have powerful socialism lovers in Congress and the White House.

https://providencemag.com/video/venezuelas-chavismo-disaster/  

Our media flunkies are bragging about the literacy rate in Cuba. What's to read? More Communist propaganda about how great the Castros were? More lies about the heroic Motherland? And who can trust the data from a Communist country? Other Latin American countries also saw literacy and health care improve in the same decades, and they didn't have to give up their freedoms. Also, if a family tried to provide their children with religious instruction, those children would then not be allowed a higher education and a career. How's that for literacy?

And it's all coming to the USA if you don't pay attention to your local school board, stop the cancel culture workshops in your churches and community organizations, if you don't put the NFL and MLB owners in their place by refusing to play (watch) their games or support their sponsors, if you don't go to the polls in 2022, if you don't insist on honest elections free of "pandemic" special rules for some.


Cuba isn't the only western country with political prisoners. Compare the January 6 prisoners with those arrested for the ongoing assaults on Democrat run cities and federal property. You can't even find a total because our "free press" refuses to investigate. Here's just ONE list for ONE riot in ONE city. Our Columbus still hasn't recovered from the Floyd riots. 


There will never be a fair investigation as long as Nancy Pelosi is in charge, because she's the one who dropped the ball (deliberately, I believe) when she knew from undercover investigation that people planned to storm the capitol. That said, she's ordered no investigation of who killed Ashli Babbitt, and unless that's included there should be no investigation.

Friday, July 23, 2021

Media bias

Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC is blaming Trump that Biden minority voters aren't getting the vaccine. She's blaming the people who are telling the truth for "misinformation" on cable news (which Democrats dominate). She's the culprit. No one on Fox or Newsmax has told people not to get the vaccine, but plenty on MSNBC and CNN have blamed Trump who pushed to have the vaccines developed for their failed roll out. Trump is living rent free in their heads.

Thursday, July 22, 2021

The wealth gap--again

Democrats have whined and moaned about the wealth gap or wealth inequality for as long as I can remember--even back to the 40 years I was a Democrat. That Jeff Bezos and Nancy Pelosi would laugh at my current wealth compared to theirs really doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when Bezos can buy and sell Pelosi and SHE is fearful of that gap between them. She's the one insecure, not me. Together they (with other Democrats and CEOs) pass laws that take my wealth to transfer to people who probably need a social safety net, but she and he won't pay for it.

What really helps the poor are good jobs, not more government handouts. Under Trump, real wealth held by the bottom half of households grew faster — over three times faster — than wealth held by the top half of households in the 2017-2020 period, and almost three times faster than for the top 1 percent. Now Biden is paying people to not return to work, something that will not help them advance and succeed.

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Thank goodness for men who can fix things

I'm back in my Columbus home at my desk by the living room window. While we've been gone (at Lakeside), the light bulbs have all been replaced and the windows and screens have been washed by a friend who started a handyman service after he retired from his corporate CEO job (likes to putter). I need sunglasses it's so bright. And at Lakeside, all our 1944 cast iron plumbing is being replaced by plumbers who are strong and thin enough to slide into the crawl space next to the basement to get access.

 Old age is certainly exciting. So many changes.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

And I still don't have a smart phone

Four years ago I wrote this. Nothing much has changed.

Not only do I not know how to use a smart phone as many my age do, but I don’t know how to do the simplest, ordinary everyday tasks familiar to my grandmothers (b. 1876 and 1896): harness a carriage horse, kill, gut and pluck a chicken, milk a cow, trim a kerosene wick or bank the stove with corn cobs to heat water for a weekly bath. Nothing I did in my professional life (academic librarian in Slavic Studies, agriculture, veterinary medicine at 2 different universities) lasted even a year or two, and unless they were digitized, my publications have disappeared. Did the student reconstructing road kill for a class project go on to make a difference, or the horse on the treadmill help someone get tenure? It was exceptionally interesting--but did it matter?

I do think education is over rated. At least higher education Did my job make a difference like the men who build, plumb and wire houses that last for over a hundred years? Or was it even as important as the commercial truck drivers who deliver food that someone else has grown, harvested and packaged for my use?
 
I probably spent half my professional life attending meetings, or writing reports, or staring at budgets of cuts that never seem to come together. At annual review time with my boss (he visited each library) I'd scoop everything off my ancient desk and put it in a box. About 6 weeks later I'd look in the box--usually nothing needed attention. Occasionally today I run into a former dean or department chair at Panera's who remembers me, and that's nice, but I do wonder if they have the same thoughts I do.

There is a new normal after the pandemic

I doubt that I'm the only one who is questioning the "new normal" for work, church and education, let alone reliance on virtual medicine. I'm stunned by the happy talk. No one expected a pandemic to disrupt our lives; so why do smart people expect there will be no more world wide disruptions or disasters of a kind we're not prepared for?

Like a volcanic explosion to create another "year without summer" like in the 19th century or a little ice age to last 500 years instead of global warming?

Like China totally in control of the cyber-grid and closing down the financial system, the churches, and their puppets in the White House?

Or a bio-disaster escaping from our own government supported labs?

Or a natural plague of rodents like the mice in Australia?

Or increasing shutdown/lockdown of Christians and our courts upholding that oppression?

Or unusual tropical diseases brought in across our border by illegals from many countries entering through Mexico then scattered around the country by plane and bus to be dropped in unsuspecting communities?

We had a taste earlier of a gasoline supply hack, and a hack of one of the major food suppliers (increasingly controlled by only 4 companies). Those hacks should have shown us how vulnerable we are, how fragile the safety net is. We've already seen Big Tech become more powerful than an elected President while half the country and one party looked the other way. Why do we assume this behemoth can't shut down the entire government, the military and the science complex we're depending on to solve our moral and spiritual problems?

Monday, July 19, 2021

Those who misled us during the pandemic

"The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research."

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Joanne Reece Launer (1933-2021)

A friend called today and told us of the death of Joanne Reece Launer, a friend since 1967, one of the first we met when we moved to Columbus. We were in a Couples Group with her and her first husband, Jim, at First Community Church, and they lived just a few blocks from us. We knew her daughter as a toddler and remember when her son Tim was born. She was 88.
Joanne Pugh Reece Launer. On Sunday, June 21, 2021, Jo went home to be with the Lord at the age of 88 after struggling with Parkinson's disease for several years. Joanne ("Gumpy" and "JoJo" to her 6 grandchildren) was born on February 17, 1933, in Dayton, OH to Walter and Margaret Pugh. She graduated from Springboro High School, received her elementary education degree from Miami University in 1955, and taught for many years in Kettering and Upper Arlington, OH. On April 11, 1964, she married the first love of her life, James Sabine Reece. They shared 28 wonderful years together and raised two children, Christine (Reece) Mathews and James Timothy Reece. After being widowed for 18 years, she married the second love of her life, Emil Andy Launer on March 13, 2011. They were devoted to one another and enjoyed 10 laughter-filled years. Joanne's life was marked by her love for her family and friends, her passion for education, and by living out her faith in the Lord through her wonderful cooking, hospitality, and service to others. She was an avid Cincinnati Reds and Ohio State football fan all her life, as well as a killer Rummikub player. She was active in church membership and attended several Bible studies. After her retirement, she kept busy traveling with friends, substitute teaching, and leading tours at the Ohio Statehouse. She was an extremely loyal friend and had a sharp wit and a fantastic sense of humor. Joanne was preceded in death by her parents Daniel and Margaret, her brothers Bob and Tom, and her first husband Jim. She is survived by her husband, Andy; sister, Sandy (Larry) Hefflin; children, Christine (Todd) Mathews and Tim (Harriet) Reece; and her grandchildren, Amanda, Trenton, Aaron, Kathryn, Luke, and Rachel. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the charity of your choice, in Jo's memory. A Celebration of Life service will be held at Dublin Baptist Church later this summer. Please visit www.schoedinger.com to share a memory or send condolences to Jo's family. Arrangements Entrusted to SCHOEDINGER NORTHWEST, 1740 Zollinger Rd., Upper Arlington, OH 43221. Legacy.com

Saturday, July 17, 2021

The true cost of food--final 2021 report by Rockefeller Foundation

This report it being touted by various liberal sources charging the "American diet" or "food system" is killing us, the environment, damaging the health of minorities and costing all of us $1.1 trillion annually, much more than the price tag.
 
I've glanced through it (if Washington Post loves it, it must be worth reading, right?) I can't see there's anything different than what I knew when I was Agriculture Economics librarian at OSU in the 1980s. Except the heavy emphasis on equity and underserved communities. That's a giant wet snow ball that gets bigger with every report from the foundations and universities.
 
One thing for sure--as you see more and more stats on the inequities of the pandemic, you can certainly look at diet, obesity, and its outcomes. We were told this from the beginning of Covid that co-morbidities are a serious problem. Obesity is 1.2x more prevalent in Black Americans and diagnosed diabetes are 1.7x higher in Latin Americans than White Americans, and 1.5x higher in
Black Americans than White Americans. So behind the curtain is the "blame whites" for the diets and culture of minorities, even though co-morbidities among whites are nothing to brag on. If we've learned nothing else, we've been told blacks should be arrested, or die, or buy homes at the same percentage as their population.

If you read the bibliography/footnotes/side bars/ tables, you see enough holes to drive a truck of pastries through. This is not to say the "system" isn't wasteful or fattening, but the suggestion is always for big brother to do something--do anything. I've been reading these final reports for 40 years. And Americans just get fatter, waste more food, and eat out even more.
 
And now that Biden is in office, what's another trillion or so? Do you really think the $$ from the $2.2 trillion American Rescue Plan will go to eat more vegetables and fruits? Families with a joint income of less than $150,000 will receive $3,600 per child under the age of 6, and up to $3,000 for children between 6 and 17 years old in 2021.
"Even using this limited scope, human health impacts are the biggest “hidden” cost of the food system, with close to $1.1 trillion per year (est.) in health-related costs to American taxpayers. The majority of these costs—$604 billion—are attributable to health care costs related to diet-related diseases such hypertension, cancer, and diabetes. The additional costs are impacts from health care costs from workplace injuries, food insecurity and pollution, and additional costs attributable to obesity." p. 17

You can down load this. Wonderful graphics. Just remember the direction it goes.

Biden working for censorship like Hong Kong and Cuba

Biden is working quickly to control/shutdown freedom of speech. Like Hong Kong and Cuba. Both Communist governments.

"“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook , ” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday, referring to coronavirus misinformation. Meanwhile, the Surgeon General, an officer in the department of Health and Human Services, released a report with a page of suggestions on “what technology platforms can do” to crack down on certain information. The Verge reported that officials at Twitter “met with the surgeon general’s office on Monday to discuss its misinformation policies.” (Wall St. Journal, "Censorship coordination deepens," July 16, 2021)

Democrats--the party of wealth and power

How often during the last year of wokeness have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? . . .
 
Do we need another performance-art sermon on America’s innate unfairness from billionaire entertainers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, or Oprah Winfrey, or from multimillionaire Delta or Coca-Cola CEOs? . . .
 
By 2018, Democratic representatives were in control of all 20 of the wealthiest congressional districts. In the recent presidential primaries and general election, 17 of the 20 wealthiest ZIP codes gave more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans. . .
 
Class is fluid; race is immutable. So by fixating on race, the left believes that it can divide America into permanent victimizers and victims—at a time when race and class are increasingly disconnecting.

Friday, July 16, 2021

Let them die says CRT proponent

I haven't heard any parents opposing CRT threatening blacks with death, but that's how the proponents are responding--let them die. Michelle Leete, vp of PTA and NAACP in Fairfax, VA. So all you Democrats believing this is no problem, that it's just academic, listen up. . . It's Marxism.  I'm calling it hate speech.

What is choice--to a Democrat?

Democrats still don’t understand choice. One can have a vaccine (aka the shot which isn’t actually a vaccination), and still advocate for freedom of choice. Democrats only think abortion when they say choice, when that is destroying someone else’s body. A choice to kill. The most vulnerable. The weakest. Those who can’t fight back. Democrats ridiculed Trump’s Warp Speed, called it dangerous, said he’d never meet the deadline, said it was unsafe. Now they fret that many don't trust the vaccine.  Well, duh!  Fauci, who Trump put on TV every night, and who was supposed to be advising him, was actually working behind the scenes covering up his deeds with the Wuhan Lab. The media said calling it the Wuhan Virus was racist, further trying to smear Trump. And as they all now admit sheepishly, it most likely was a leak (or a deliberate plant) from a 3rd rate lab that U.S. taxpayers were funding and with whom Fauci had been working by funding a non-profit through the NIH. So that implicates us all, if we use the systemic racism meme of the woke—we taxpayers helped the Chinese spread a pandemic.

Also, after denying inflation for months, the Biden folks are finally admitting it, but still going ahead with the 3+ trillion demands to spread it. I saw a very ordinary steak at the grocery today for close to $20/pound. Used car prices are up 85%. We can’t trust Biden and cronies on anything—not health, not inflation, not Cuba, not withdrawal and leaving our allies behind in Afghanistan, not securing the border, not stopping the drug traffic, not protecting our freedom of speech and assembly, and definitely not with our money no matter what they say it’s for—Covid, infrastructure, families, etc. And Blacks particularly should not trust the most racist president ever (based on his speeches and voting record of the past)—he thinks they are too dumb to get an ID!

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Recommendations for alternative listening

My friend Julie recommends some alternative radio sources if you're missing Rush.

"I started following people on the back channels or Rumble like x22, patriot streetfighter, AWK [And We Know],  Mel K, RedPill78, Santa Surfing, Thrivetime Show. Also listen to folks on Youtube like Dutch Sheets, Elijah Streams, Monkey Werx. Much more interesting and they can talk about everything that is really going on in the world. Also listen to Dr. Dave Janda on Sunday afternoons on WAAM radio out of Ann Arbor. He has a great show with great guests. I was a loyal GB and Rush listener for many, many years but Glenn isn't as interesting any more compared to all the other stuff I'm trying to watch on the internet. Since the Cabal owns all the radio syndicates, I think their people have their hands tied about certain topics. I have heard Buck and Clay [Rush replacement in that time slot in Central Ohio] a few times when I'm in the car. They're not bad but they could never replace Rush. I loved Rush mostly for his humor and nicknames. I will never forget Rush saying, "Struck Stroke Smirk." Your eyes will be opened wide once you start following some of the online/rumble/bitchute/brighteon. Let's see if FB blocks this post because of some of the names mentioned."

My friend Terri suggests the following.  "Other good alternatives... The Right Side with Doug Billings (He just went through all of the patents filed since 2004 and the published plans for lockdowns, media involvement/hype re vlrus, testing and vaccin3 - yes since 2004), The Professor’s Record, Stew Peters of Red Voice Media, Liz Wheeler, Man in America (based in Columbus OH)... a lot of Patriots working hard to get the truth out there since MSM is covering it up!"

And of course, I always recommend Zuby's podcasts , a rapper and athlete, with various people in the know and in the news. Conservative Christian.  He's the son of Nigerians, a British citizen, with an American accent. 

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Which Black Lives Matter

 

One man died in May 2020 due to poor police training, not racial animostiy, in a Democrat run city. Thousands rioted and hundreds, mostly young black men, died (most media sources stopped giving totals after June 2020). But primarily in Democrat control cities like Columbus, Ohio, where police were told to stand down. (Mayor denied it, but we are friends with a black police officer.) Do Black lives really matter, and are you being told the truth about police? When interviewer Scott Pelley (CBS) asked Minnesota AG Keith Ellison whether the murder was a hate crime, the prosecutor replied: "I wouldn't call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there's an explicit motive and of bias. We don't have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd's race." 

 I wrote this 5 years ago—Obama was president--and it’s still true.
Black lives matter began on social media, was picked up and distributed by mainstream, all about the false narrative that police kill blacks out of proportion to the population. But crime isn't committed that way. The victimization rate for Blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for Whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for Blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost eight times higher than the rate for Whites (4.5 per 100,000). (Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 NCJ 236018) From 2003-2009 among reported arrest-related deaths, 42% of persons were white, 32% were black, and 20% were Hispanic. And crime rates for blacks is 8x that of whites. (Bureau of Justice. Arrest related deaths, 2003-2009. NCJ 235385) So Whites are being killed at a higher rate than Blacks. We don’t see it on TV cable news.

Friday, July 09, 2021

Twitter thread on why Trump supporters are suspicious of 2020 vote count

This is copied from This is By Far, Best, Most Thoughtful Explanation For Why So Many Americans Believe 2020 Was a “Sham” (redvoicemedia.com) I'm not a Twitter user, but assume numbers with an x refer to a twitter post (which limits size, but it can go on, and on).  This one had 34 paragraphs. It lays out all the failures of the Democrats, our laws, the media (especially), the results of the Covid lockdown, the governors, etc. which combined have created a lot of suspicion. (Update:  Tucker identified writer as Darryl Cooper. Tucker Carlson Why So Many People Believe The Election Was Rigged (July 9, 2021) (rumble.com)
"I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them. 2/x

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc). 3/x

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them. 4/x

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. 5/x

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake. 6/x

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen. 7/x

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying. 8/x

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year. 9/x

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin. 10/x

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper. 11/x

GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election. 12/x

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem. 13/x

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them. 14/x

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. 15/x

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. 16/x

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots. 17/x

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. 18/x

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution. 19/x

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now. 20/x

Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. 21/x

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” – but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares? 22/x

Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned. 23/x

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information. 24/x

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. 25/x

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew. 26/x

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. 27/x

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc – but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!). 28/x

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof. 29/x

Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They’ll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? 30/x

It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too. 31/x

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. 32/x

They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct. 33/x

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1,
b) The press is part of the operation, 
c) Election rules were changed, 
d) Big Tech censors opposition, 
e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged,
f) Trump is banned from social media. 34/x

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive. /end

A good prayer for these times

A Lakeside friend sends several e-mails a day--sometimes jokes, sometimes political comments, and then one like this. This is really good. I’ve been grumbling again about some of the failings of our church (as I see it), but perhaps the Lord is making biscuits.
A pastor attended a men's breakfast in the middle of a rural farming area of the country.

The group had asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast:

"Lord, I hate buttermilk," the farmer began. The visiting pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.

The farmer loudly proclaimed, "Lord, I hate lard." Now the pastor was growing concerned.

Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, "And Lord, you know I don't much care for raw white flour."

The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn't the only one to feel uncomfortable.

Then the farmer added, "But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits.

So Lord, when things come up that we don't like, when life gets hard, when we don't understand what you're saying to us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits. Amen."

Thursday, July 08, 2021

Is Washington Post waking up to the truth about Covid relief

“Of the tens of billions of dollars allotted by Congress for emergency aid, only $1.5 billion had been spent by the end of May.” July 7, 2021 Washington Post

Whew.  Are they really catching on to the crooks in this business?

Wednesday, July 07, 2021

Let's recap how Kelly (a nurse) feels about the vaccine

"Let’s recap:

I am not anti vaccine.

I am pro choice vaccine.

If you have COVID T-Cell antibodies, you have protection almost to the same degree as one who is vaccinated, and the CDC never encouraged people to be tested before getting the vaccine. Think about why that is .

Children are low risk and do not need the vaccine ( I don’t care what Fauci says) unless they have a significant pre-existing condition.

The vaccine isn’t a cure . You can still contract COVID but most likely will have a mild case but THIS IS SPECULATIVE.

The government and Health experts made many errors and mistakes with recommendations so therefore, we have every right to question their authority.

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON for a government official to go door to door other than to track YOUR PERSONAL DECISION.

The vaccine is widely accessible now . If you want it you can get it .

Our “experts” politicized this virus . You cannot mix politics with science and that is exactly what they did .

We will continue to hear variant after variant from the media and they will use that to keep the fear alive. People are getting COVID fatigue. They’ve stopped listening a long time ago.

The answer was simple ; protect the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with their lives, but that did not happen did it?"

Monday, July 05, 2021

Thoughts on diversity

A terrible sight watching the implosion of the rest of the Champlain complex in Surfside, Florida. Reporters have focused many times on the diversity of the resident community, some home owners there for 40 years. It's beautiful. But when they report on flyover country, Trump supporters and political alliances in their big money making stories, they don't comment on the beauty of Finns, Swedes, Germans, English, Irish, Poles, Serbians, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, Afghans, Egyptians, Lebanese, Israelis, Palestinians, Croatians, Spanish, Welsh or the mosaic of nationalities that make up this great country, IF they are pale or Caucasian. The liberal media only care about skin color. Not culture, families, relationships, skills, not even history--when many of these groups were avowed enemies, yet now are united brothers and sisters under God and flag.
 
The purpose of the media is 1) to make money, and 2) divide and conquer with a dangerous political agenda.

Saturday, July 03, 2021

The woke military

How are Americans served by the woke take over of the military? Recommending that sailors read books that trash the Constitution and denounce the country as irredeemably racist is not just absurd—it’s downright dangerous. Why recommend books staking out extremist positions when the Navy is newly embarked on an effort to drive political extremism from its ranks?
On Feb. 26, three Republican members of Congress—Jim Banks (Ind.) Doug Lamborn (Colo.) and Vicky Hartzler (Mo.)—wrote the Pentagon expressing specific concerns about the divisive messages espoused by several of the books and the lopsided nature of the reading list. The books in question were Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Jason Pierceson’s “Sexual Minorities and Politics.”   The Navy’s Reading Program Undermines America’s Security | The Heritage Foundation
We all know these movements never elevate--they only devolve. Knock down a statue of a local confederate hero in a small town park (who was pardoned by 2 different presidents), and move on to President Lincoln and a Catholic saint. It's like an alcoholic saying one little drink won't hurt and it might steady my nerves. Meanwhile, children work in mines for rare earth minerals to feed our cell phone addictions, and Nike uses slave labor in China whom we're afraid to offend. And we smugly say our generation is smarter and more humane.

Over the years, conservatives have been systematically blocked, removed or silenced in academe, so from the rough draft to the review committee to the publisher to the library, all gates are closed by leftist gatekeepers. In the schools and the libraries you find very little of an alternate viewpoint than what comes out of the universities.  Now the same is happening in the military if one wants a promising career. It seems many decades since 9/11 when patriotism soared instead of 20 years. You'll read the same drivel in every scholarly journal whether medicine, religion, biology, archeology, history, foreign service or music--climate change, racism, CRT, genderism, and America is a terrible, oppressive country. The other day I read about why Go Fund Me efforts were racist.

Biden's dragnet

The FBI has 14,000 hours of video footage of January 6 and are arresting people all over the country in a huge dragnet, but still no word on who murdered Ashli Babbitt. Hundreds of rioters have been sent back to the streets of Democrat cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Portland to loot and burn again making minority neighborhoods pay for their crimes, and uncounted numbers of drug pushers and sex traffickers are invited to cross the border during this administration which has lost sight of protecting its own citizens.





Friday, July 02, 2021

Marinated Cucumbers, Onions, and Tomatoes--nice summer salad

It's been awhile since I posted a recipe.  Usually, they are too complicated and I don't bother.  But this one looks easy.  I saw it at a cousin-in-law's Facebook page. (We've never met.)

Marinated Cucumbers, Onions, and Tomatoes

Ingredients:

3 medium cucumbers, peeled and sliced 1/4 inch thick
1 medium onion, sliced and separated into rings
3 medium tomatoes, cut into wedges
1/2 cup vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon fresh coarse ground black pepper
1/4 cup oil

How to make it:
Combine ingredients in a large bowl and mix well.
Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving

Thursday, July 01, 2021

GOP hearings on origin of Covid--lab or market

I hope you watched the GOP's hearings on the origin of Covid--hearings the Democrats refused to participate in, and Dr. Fauci wouldn't appear. The cover up gets more massive all the time. Fauci was sending hush up warnings to his own people, not even Birx was included, then calming, no problem e-mails to the Trump advisors. The man knew from the beginning this was from a lab and that he'd be implicated because the research on gain of function had continued despite Trump stopping it.
 
One scientist testified that everyone who knew him told him not to testify, and one even told him it was because it might help Trump! Another scientist was told his lab would never work again with the Chinese if he testified about the origins of the virus. I doubt this was reported on cable news. That "we may never know" line they've been repeating? They already know.

Democrats are so worried about an outspoken Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who is a match for AOC, but they don't seem to worry about the huge crimes (and deaths) perpetrated by non-elected bureaucrats on the American people during this pandemic.

2008 and 2016--one president failed, the other one didn't

When Obama was elected in 2008, people were dancing in the streets--going wild--at last the USA had overcome. 99% of black voters voted for him and white liberals sighed with relief! Yet the country spiraled downward for 8 years under more oppressive government control. No progress for blacks, economy slumbered, war didn't end, took forever to get the wealth transfers out the door.
 
Then Trump was elected in 2016, and the same people wept, got hysterical, screamed, marched in pink hats. Yet he actually met his commitments, best employment record ever for minorities, Europe had to step up and pay its bills, the border although not solved (it's Congress' problem) settled down and criminals were stopped, and religious freedom blossomed. Yet, the crooks in government, both parties, were horrified. They ramped up the intersectionality, and called everything, EVERYTHING, racism. They threw everything at him. Biggest con job ever. If Obama ushered in a glorious black renaissance for 8 years, how did it change overnight when things got better for everyone?

White Fragility is causing massive divisiveness

There are even white men (gasp) who have something to say about the motives behind the planned, organized divisiveness. James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody" (2020). He exposed the bogus scholarship behind the woke movement. It should have laughed some of these authors and experts off the planet, but instead they just publish more because they make so much money. They are tearing apart the workplace, our schools, our universities, our churches, our clubs, and now quiet sleepy, all white gated Lakeside.

Defund the police

Amazing how the Democrats in Congress with their carbon copy media are now trying to say defund police is a Republican idea. I guess NYC will have to paint over those defund police signs in the street?

Will all the videos of AOC and the squad and their co-conspirators disappear? Or maybe the ignorant voters could look at the federal budget and see Washington DC doesn't fund the local police. 

From USAFacts: "State and local governments spent $193 billion on law enforcement and corrections in 2017. Local governments were responsible for $129 billion, or two-thirds of that spending. Law enforcement spending ranks behind education ($684 billion) as the second-largest spending category for local government budgets." 

Infrastructure is also state, local and private developer spending--so when you see Biden charming CNN and MSNBC with his lies about that, just look it up.

About virtue signaling yard signs

A gentle reminder. Lakeside is a respite, or could be, from the aches and ills of the pandemic and 24/7 politics. Our Association rules are quite clear about signs and advertising, rule 1.9, p. 115 of the current LOPA Directory. Not only are political belief signs not permitted except before an election (i.e. not during the season), but they are off-putting to neighbors, guests, and renters no matter how clever by half.

This poem might be a good yard sign. . . on your own property.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

—Emily Dickinson

The so-called insurrection

Pelosi wants to investigate the January 6 incident where a woman was killed by either Capitol police or a private security guard. We've never found out. Because she wasn't black, Pelosi just lauded the police. But the truth is not what she's looking for. She wants to threaten and demean every Trump supporter, even if they were never involved. She doesn't want to look at the killings since the George Floyd death, and the billions of losses to businesses and black communities in Democrat controlled cities. Because to Pelosi, Black Lives Don't Matter. Only power, control and politics matter.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

A year ago at Lakeside

A photo of our nation in a lockdown that had never been tested or proven effective, ordered by governors and low level public health officers drunk on power, wearing masks that had never been tested for this virus, while refusing to allow discussion and censoring science by the very companies who were making money hand over fist by keeping us out of libraries, churches, and schools.

 

Things are much better this year; I see only a few masks.  Usually Democrats.




Americans are becoming serfs in their own country.

Bill Gates is the biggest "farmer" in the country--owns millions of acres of farmland rented to other farmers. Controls the seeds.

Four food processing corporations own 80% of our processing ability, the "food chain."
Four financial institutions are buying up all the affordable housing and eventually we'll only be able to rent.
 
Big Tech and Big Pharma silence free speech and research about the global pandemic, putting our lives in danger.
 
A major, left of center podcast (Darkhorse) has been shut down for daring to suggest Ivermectin can be a tool, not a cure, not a vaccine, just like other safe medications.
 
Big Tech colluded with Democrats to shut down the only president of either party, to bring new ideas and a fresh look at the power of our intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI) that are spying on Americans and particularly conservative organizations and non-profits. He called out our "allies" to pay their fair share, and protected our Bill of Rights and Border. How scary was that for the moles in government!

Democrats in Congress are encouraging crime in black communities through defund police efforts, slogans and street riots,, assisted by a flow of illegals to take their futures, as well as encouraging death to their next generation through abortion.
 
Academe has become completely a left wing think tank for Marxists in the government, and the gatekeeper for who teaches and who gets in, after convincing generations they couldn't succeed without a college degree.


https://youtu.be/PQTbpJl2-Ho  The meat mafia, Glenn Beck













Tuesday, June 29, 2021

The definition of food insecurity. It isn't hunger.

USAFacts is doing a feature on "food insecurity." That term was invented because there is not enough actual hunger in the U.S. to measure by population and put in a graph. However, I read far enough to get to the "food desert" definition. Notice: "easy and ample access." 
"What is a food desert? The Department of Agriculture defines them as an area where low-income people do not have easy and ample access to food retailers. This limits people’s access to affordable, nutritious food."
Here's what happens. When a chain store with jobs and fresh fruits and vegetables plans to expand in a poor neighborhood, they are run out of town by organized protests from the Left and tied up for years in the courts battling city codes. It's like when AOC got an Amazon distribution center run out of her district. And what company would ever invest in Portland or Minneapolis after the anti-police, pro-crime riots of the last year?



"Over the past decade, federal and local governments in the United States have spent hundreds of millions of dollars encouraging grocery stores to open in food deserts. The federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative has leveraged over $1 billion in financing for grocers in under-served areas. . . We studied the grocery purchases of about 10,000 households in those neighborhoods. While it’s true that these households buy less healthy groceries than people in wealthier neighborhoods, they do not start buying healthier groceries after a new supermarket opened. Instead, we find that people shop at the new supermarket, but they buy the same kinds of groceries they had been buying before."


Monday, June 28, 2021

Sit back and enjoy what's great about America--at least 15 years ago

Having grown up in Mumbai, India--Dinesh D'Souza is able to identify aspects of America that are invisible to people who have always lived here. As a "person of color," he is competent to address such questions as what it is like to be a nonwhite person in America, what this country owes its minority citizens, and whether immigrants can expect to be granted full membership in this society. This article is 15 years old. Today's virulent race theory and hate-America first isn't new. Obama wasn't even president when this was written, although he built on it. It was developing in the 1980s and 1990s in its own homeland, the U.S. academic system, where I worked.

Sunday, June 27, 2021

Trump came to Wellington, Ohio. I'd never heard of it.

I was a huge fan of Ted Cruz--still am. Probably the finest speaker in the Senate. I never thought I'd think of Trump as a fluent, articulate speaker--but then the Democrats put Joe Biden in the White House. The leftist whisperer--green new deal, ya'll come and invade our country, steal more from the middle class with inflation and raising taxes, enrich the oligarchs, stop the Christians, and encourage class/race hate. All with that deer in the headlights look, fumbling his index cards because he can't see the teleprompter. Yes, Trump has never sounded so good, so sane, so practical.

Saturday, June 26, 2021

Ethics probe stopped by Biden

This week a mumbling, whispering confused Joe Biden referred to the Tuskegee Airmen as the men the federal government experimented on for decades--completely rewriting history. The media just smile. Good old Joe. Well, the government did actually experiment on black men right into the 1970s, and it is still protecting experiments with humans--and Biden is pushing child abuse by shutting down the investigation. This research was stopped by President Trump, but it's baaaaack. The ghouls of the Biden administration have given the “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies "license to use the skin, brains, liver, and eyeballs of aborted children for taxpayer-funded research."

 But Biden doesn't tweet, thank goodness.


There have been many government commissions and ethics panels. List of former entities found in the Georgetown archives. https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/pcbe/reports/past_commissions/?  some of which include fetal and stem cell. Good intentions, no results. Looking through them in the index section, I see that most authors are "unknown," and the comments and summaries are gobbledegook of academics and bureaucrats, particularly this 1975 report on Research on the Fetus, Research on the Fetus (georgetown.edu)

Where major corporations are investing, guest blogger Michael Smith

"If you are paying attention, you do not need an army of analysts or a divining rod to find water here.

Meat prices at the grocery store are going up - and yet the price on the hoof is not. As a matter of fact, many cattle producers are caught in a squeeze and losing money on a per head basis. I saw a report a few weeks ago that noted the retail businesses have a profit margin of about $30 per head of cattle while the meat processor’s margin is around $1000 per head. The rancher’s margin? Between $10 a head and loss of $30, depending on the timing of the sale.

How does that work? The answer is that it does not.
 
The meat processing industry is controlled by four companies, Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef, that process 80% of all slaughtered animals and because access to processing is so limited, you either sell to them or one of their agents or you do not sell at all. Why would the meat processors be putting so much pressure on the producers of protein on the hoof?

Well, at present, three of the four major processors have gone woke, adopting the ESG methods of corporate control. Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance data refers to metrics related to intangible assets within the enterprise, roughly equivalent to China’s Social Credit System (that ranks citizens and punishes them with throttled internet speeds and flight bans if the Communist Party deems them untrustworthy).

And a good ESG score means you must believe in anthropogenic climate change. The “climate scientists” at the UN have determined that livestock production, especially raising cattle, generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent than transportation. In 2006, senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said, “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

Cow farts are killing us.

Why would meat processors be destroying their own businesses?

They really are not. They will still process cattle, but the meat will be far more expensive, a luxury for most – but where these companies are putting their investments is telling – fake meat. Each of these companies are pouring millions into research and development of plant-based protein meat substitutes.
Plant-based? Is it any wonder why Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farm land in the United States?

Several large investment firms are buying up single family homes. BlackRock, the largest asset management firm on the planet with over $9 trillion in assets, and other money institutions buying up single-family homes as quickly as they can at rates higher than the average homebuyer is willing to pay. Of course, taking homes off the market by overpaying for them, drives overall home prices up.
Why? Well first, these investment firms can borrow money at historically low rates, even lower than any individual home buyer, but the goal is more insidious - BlackRock and others are causing a shift from home ownership to renting (BlackRock is also the third largest institutional shareholder in the "engineered meat" producer, Beyond Meat).
 
Renting degrades the economy for lower and middle class folks while limiting their upward financial mobility by robbing them of the equity increases home ownership typically brings. This is not just BlackRock, Bloomberg just published an article claiming that “America should become a nation of renters”, further stating “The very features that made houses an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.”

This idea, coupled with BlackRock’s actions, simply points to a commoditization of the housing market and a consolidation into corporate control of the foundational asset of the American family, their own home. It represents the loss of individual control of another asset class and a created dependence on corporations for the most basic of needs, shelter.

Now, add to that the control over media and the fact the Internet Overlords and Social Media Commissars have become agents of the federal government and the Democrat Party, and you have a pretty good idea of where the corporations and the big investors think we are going.

Biden's government continues its radical eco-agenda. Aside from being implicated tree spiking in the Pacific Northwest, an ecoterrorist act, and support for government enforced population control, Biden's horrific nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning, is notoriously anti-cattle grazing rights on federal lands. In her graduate thesis, Stone-Manning wrote:

"The origin of our abuses is us. If there were fewer of us, we would have less impact. We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans."

The thesis also goes on to claim that cattle grazing on public lands is "destroying the West."
While not busying himself with mumbling incoherently, creepily whispering to reporters and lying about the Constitution, Dementia Joe is shutting down pipeline construction and cutting off oil leases on public lands.

What could go wrong?

Pick any dystopian novel or movie production – Blade Runner, Alien, Fahrenheit 451, Soylent Green, even The Fifth Element – all feature a future managed and controlled by marriages between corporations and governments and people dependent upon that unholy marriage for housing and sustenance.
 
This is a future being created today in the boardrooms and halls of government - and a one that is entirely avoidable.

They say science fiction will become science fact.

Let us hope not.

Remember – Soylent Green is people."

*     *    *

Glenn Beck has also done extensive research on the problem,  https://youtu.be/PQTbpJl2-Ho  seeing it as an extension of the Obama fundamental transformation.  The great reset.




Friday, June 25, 2021

BLM nominee wants to limit your family size

"Tracy Stone-Manning, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), once wrote that Americans “breed” too much, called American children “environmental hazards,” and stated that U.S. citizens should stop “at one or two kids” for the sake of the environment." (Catholic vote, via The Loop)

Our birth rate is below replacement, so we've got a nominee who wants even more reasons to import low income immigrants to do the bidding of rich, government and hi-tech plutocrats?

A comment on this story by Bill M.: "I have 6 kids. Had my wife and I stopped at 2, the world would have missed out on an environmental biologist, a food quality manager, a nurse practitioner and a biomedical engineer. All have impacted the world positively! I guess the first 2, an epidemiologist and a chemical engineer would have be OK." 

Usually these "save the planet" folks are all for aborting black and brown babies.

Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show--in Rush's time slot


I had my first opportunity to listen to https://clayandbuck.com/ show the last 2 days. On 610 am in Columbus they are in the Rush Limbaugh time slot--noon to 3 p.m. I'd never heard of Clay, but have followed Buck off and on since he was a regular on the Glenn Beck show years ago. Good topics--not news of course, but clearly stated to be their opinion. At CNN and MSNBC you get opinion shows, "hate America shows," "excuse the Bidens all their crimes shows" which are called news. Bad idea.

But I am a tad concerned about Buck's speech in this format. I don't know if he's speaking faster than usual because there are 2 of them and it's conversation, or if he's got a loose tooth. His formerly very precise and careful speech is sounding squishy. It's the sibilant sounds--anything with an S sound, see, say, first, or with some letter c words like, place, which seems to be an orphan without its own sound. Some consonant blends also sound slurpy to my ear.

Maybe it's my imagination, but I think when two speakers are very close in sound (they both are very deep), they are difficult to distinguish in radio format. Red Eye Radio, which is a talk show for truckers in Texas, with Eric Harley and Gary McNamara, has the same format, and I can't tell the two of them apart.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

The voter ID bill could actually hurt--we have a history

Senate Republicans blocked an election overhaul bill favored by Democrats. The party-line vote was 50-50, ten votes shy of the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster and advance the legislation, which would ban voter ID requirements and enable ballot harvesting. (The Loop)
All voters, but particularly blacks, should be very cautious about any government program intended to protect their vote or push ahead their community.
 
How did those free-ways through your neighborhoods in the 1950s work out for you and your businesses?
 
Did knocking down old buildings in your neighborhoods and building high rise slums really benefit your communities' safety, spirit, and health?
 
What did school integration do for your students when black teachers were moved to white districts so white kids could be exposed to successful adult blacks?
 
And how about all the wealth transfer programs that keep you on Medicaid and in Section 8 housing because you would lose benefits if you tried to advance?
 
What about all the federal and state aid that have pushed dads out of the home--are your young men stronger or have they just joined gangs?
 
And have you really benefitted from all these full of fluff and fat administrative departments for D.I.E. (diversity, inclusion, equity) so universities and companies can brag about their POC percentages (all clustered in HR).
 
Do programs, policies and award shows for millionaire blacks that focus on race really help you reach your goals in the middle quintile?
Racism hurt us all in the past, and the neo-racism that focuses on color rather than character and skill (white fragility books, reeducation camps, CRT, BLM, the squad, etc. all funded by whites) won't be any better. By weakening the country through more socialism, it could be worse.

Monday, June 21, 2021

Biden and the Bishops

President Biden said he doesn't think the U.S. bishops will deny Holy Communion to him or other pro-abortion Catholic politicians. And for once, I agree with Biden--not that he's doing to the right thing by violating both church law and the dignity of the most powerless and poor, but that the Bishops will cave to the demands of the world. We'll have to let Jesus sort this out on Judgement Day.

Saturday, June 19, 2021

A poem about Lakeside

We'll be putting our Lakeside house on the market soon (turn key) so I'm removing personal items. Came across this poem about our Lake Erie written on a dinner napkin (probably the Patio) by a guest, which my husband matted and framed. Duke taught a poetry class at the Rhein Center, and he and Bob went to high school together.

The lake swells and drops
In rolling rhythm
As the morning sun announces
The beginning of a new day.

Reflections of sunrise
Glisten in the water
As my eyes divert to keep
The brightness at bay.

Only the artist can capture
This spectacle of light and water
On a morning like this in a
Place as inviting as Lakeside.

Duke Thomas Low 7-13-07

Friday, June 18, 2021

Bad stuff in Fulton County, Georgia and in Michigan and Arizona

 MAJOR SCANDAL BREWING: 'Just the News' Investigation Finds More than 100 Batches of Absentee Ballots in Fulton County Could Be Missing (thegatewaypundit.com)

https://americasvoice.news/video/panRMiFEBJjrmeL

Georgia investigator's notes reveal 'massive' election integrity problems in Atlanta | Just The News

Georgia audit documents expose significant election failures in state’s largest county. Records suggest more than 100 batches of absentee ballots in Fulton County could be missing. | Just The News


Hundreds of people concerned about the integrity of the Nov. 2020 election gathered outside the Michigan Capitol Thursday to protest and deliver roughly 7,000 affidavits claiming fraud and demanding a forensic audit.

Mike Huckabee said in his newsletter of June 18, "Let’s go to Maricopa County, Arizona, where the forensic examination phase of that audit is going on, with the end of this month being the target for completion. CNN reported that ballots are being trucked to a lab in Montana for analysis and showed aerial video of the remote, private land it allegedly was on. “Is this the secure, private laboratory?” CNN’s Gary Tuchman asked. “Is Arizona voting data inside that cabin? We just don’t know –- but it could be.”

According to Ken Bennett, spokesman for the audit, the voting system data is being reviewed by subcontractor CyFIR. He says he doesn’t know where this lab is, which is causing CNN to report it as a big secret and to imply that the data might be non-secure and compromised in some way. They say CyFIR CEO Ben Cotton has taken data from Arizona to Montana. But Bennett speaks more precisely, saying Cotton has a COPY of the data created by Dominion from the hard drives and servers that Maricopa County used in the election. “The original data was left completely intact,” Bennett says. https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/arizona-audit-data-taken-secret-lab-rural-montana-analysis

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Great Reset: Housing Shortage EXPOSED (2021)

 Last year we sold our son's house in Canal Winchester, Ohio.  We noticed then the demand for housing, and I became aware of the large real estate groups (to whom we didn't sell, at least I don't think we did).  Then later I became aware of the vast amounts of wealth that was made during and because of the pandemic.  Is private property coming to and end?

https://youtu.be/-CESSiPk6qs  Video on real estate values, super wealth, "reset," and global economy by "Man in America."

It's a hard life at Lakeside Chautauqua



Some days at Lakeside are not so lazy, but I'll still fit in time for a nap.
7 am: Walk along the lakefront.
8 am: Bob meets the Guys Club at the Patio for breakfast.
9 am: Preacher's hour Rev. Thom Shafer, Steele Memorial
8:30-noon: Farmer's Market at Old Schoolhouse
10:30: Taste of Lakeside, Blue Bird Cafe at Walnut Plaza
1-2 pm: Women's Club opening, Green Gables
Noon-3 p.m. Taste of Lakeside, B n B tour
5 ish: Supper with the Kullbergs at the Patio Restaurant
7:30: Vespers with Rev. Shafer
It's a tough life, but someone has to do it.

Monday, June 14, 2021

Another ZOOM group

 I participated in yet another ZOOM group at 4 p.m.  This is a writer's group, and if you're accustomed to ZOOM meetings, I think it works well.  The "facilitator" is Martha (Marti) who lives just a few doors south of me at Lakeside and is a published novelist.  She's been teaching at Lakeside's Rhein Center for many years, and last year because of the pandemic her group developed on line. I took her class many years ago and really enjoyed it.  This year, I was invited to join this group, although I haven't done much creative writing for many years.  Blogging and posting on Facebook are not usually creative--I just let off steam. I think there were 9 of us including Marti, 5 of whom I already knew. They are speaking/writing from Michigan, Toledo, Columbus, Florida and of course, Lakeside. 

Marti suggested a topic--writing a letter to someone, alive or dead--if we already weren't working on some thing.  Two of the women are working on novels, so they proceeded with that. I wrote a letter to our son, Phil, who died in April 2020 about music, his big love.  Then we all shared our writings after 30 minutes and commented on each others efforts.  That's something I need to really work on.  Being positive and supportive is what makes any writing group work.  The whole point is to keep writing, not perfection.  It's so easy for me to spot the flaws or the gap.  I'll work on being more supportive.