The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
About half the American population has not taken the COVID “vaccine”. Most of them presumably have no intention of doing so, given how widely available the government has made the experimental treatment.
That’s HALF of the population. Consider this a moment. Prostitution is illegal. So is the use of drugs such as cocaine, heroin or crystal meth. It’s a safe bet that not half of the population wishes to employ prostitutes or use drugs. But many do, and the market for these goods and services is robust and always growing, despite centuries of government laws against these activities.
If less than half the population wants drugs and prostitutes, and the government cannot do anything to stop them, then how can the government do anything about the fact that half the population does not want their experimental anti-viral drug?
Laws against prostitutes and drugs involve prohibitions. Prohibitions are easier to enforce than mandates. The mandates now being proposed regarding the government drug involve FORCIBLY putting the drug into people’s bodies.
In what universe, even in a declining, irrational and stupefied republic, can the government — consisting of people at least as hapless as the people who support it — expect to force 165 million people to take an experimental medication they do not want? Pressure them, sure — to a point. But literally force them? The same government (federal, state and local) who can’t stop millions from seeking prostitutes and using drugs will inject 165 million angry, resentful, frightened and furious persons with an unwanted vaccination.
The disintegration of the Afghanistan army after the U.S. withdrawal should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It was based on a philosophical error.
The disintegration of the Afghanistan army after the U.S. withdrawal should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It was based on a philosophical error.
Afghanistan is a third-world country dominated by the Islamic religion. Fundamentalist Islam is anti-reason and based on mysticism, including the belief that so-called natural law is based on God’s whim. Fundamentalist Islam does not believe in individual rights and is especially contemptuous of women who are viewed as inferior creatures who must not even be educated. It advocates total subservience or death for those who reject the faith and view the epitome of moral achievement to consist of self-immolation in the service of killing non-believers. The reward for men will be meeting virgins in heaven. (Note: not all Afghans are fundamentalists; those who want freedom often immigrate to freer countries.)
The Afghans defeated the Russians when they tried to take over the country. The U. S. hoped to do better. The intervention consisted of extensive training of the Afghan military and various reforms and building projects, including schools for women. It also consisted of many thousands of U. S. troops and fighter planes to hold the country together in the face of the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups. The delusion was that the non-Taliban Afghans would learn to defend themselves and eventually be able to function without our help. They never did. What was the problem?
Military training does not help fundamentalist countries in the absence of value training, and value training could only work if a large portion of the population became pro-reason and thus pro-individual rights. This would mean they would be willing to fight to the death for freedom. To my knowledge, no such training ever occurred or did occur and did not work except perhaps on a very small scale. So, in reality, the Afghans we trained to fight were fighting against people of their own religion based presumably on differences of opinion on the application of Islam. (Note: We are morally obligated to give sanctuary and, ideally, citizenship to those who risked their lives to support our soldiers and who will be in mortal danger as the fundamentalists take over. We should also admit women who have sought education and who could also be at risk).
Let’s go deeper. Could we have even tried value training in-depth and on a wide scale? Most assuredly not, because a core, false axiom today is that all religions and philosophies are morally equal. Telling the Afghans that their philosophy was fundamentally wrong would have been unthinkable— just more “western imperialism.”
But let’s say we had tried. What would have been the reaction? It would have been negative. You cannot come into a third-world country and tell them to just shape up when their philosophy has been considered a virtual axiom for millennia. The entire fundamentalist way of thinking is alien to the Enlightenment which took centuries to flourish in the west. Similarly, large-scale cultural change in third-world countries could take centuries.
So, what should we do with such countries? Leave them alone unless they terrorize us or our allies. Then, severe but focused military reprisals are proper.
It is obvious that our government made the same error in Vietnam. South Vietnam was a third-world country mired in centuries of royal rule. Their populace was not inspired by any Declaration of Independence. The few who were pro-rights were no match for millions of soldiers from the North who were happy to die for Communism.
What lesson needs to be learned from these fiascos? The key is to provide military support only to countries who are already committed to freedom and are willing to fight for it. This means they must already support Western, pro-rights values. Examples would be Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. This would also include Europe so long as they pay their fair share of the NATO budget. The U.S. should have treaties with such countries, not out of altruism but out of self-interest. There are four very dangerous dictatorships in the world today: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. These countries have nuclear weapons and want to destroy freedom everywhere. It must be made clear that they will not get away with it.
Ideally, Americans will fight to the death for freedom. It will be beneficial if it has allies that will do the same.
Those of us who are aware that the entirety of the Western media is unreliable rely on RT and Sputnik for news, but often RT and Sputnik sound like the unreliable Western media. I have noticed this for a long time. Often I thought I should write to someone, but have always been too busy.
The Russian media undermines its own effectiveness and credibility by repeating lies told by the Western presstitutes.
Here is the specific problem in the Sputnik link above: The article by Ilya Tsukanov states: “Assange received asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex crime charges.” This statement is absolutely and totally false. It is a false statement that Western media whores have repeated endlessly, but that is no excuse for Russian media to follow the whores. Julian Assange was never charged with sex crimes. There never was any extradition request on sex crime charges. The two women did not file sex charges against Assange. Both invited him into their beds. One of the women was concerned that Assange did not use a condom or that it broke. She wanted him to take a test to see if he had Aids. He foolishly refused. The woman went to the police to see if she could compel Assange to have the test. It was the police who initiated an investigation. The Swedish prosecutor investigated and ruled there had been no offense. Assange was released and left Sweden for England.
On his arrival he found that another Swedish prosecutor, some sort of feminist, had on her own initiative reopened the dismissed case. This prosecutor requested Assange’s extradition to Sweden only in order to be interviewed. The law does not provide for extradition only to be interviewed. Charges must be filed, but the basis for the charges had already been dismissed by the Swedish prosecutorial office.
Most who have carefully followed Washington’s persecution of Assange believe that the Swedish prosecutor who reopened the closed case did so in response to a Washington bribe or threat or from the feminist hatred of men. Assange, advised by his attorneys, realized that the Swedish prosecutor was abusing her power in order to turn Assange over to Washington. He sought and was granted asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.
London, on orders from Washington, refused to recognize the political asylum a country had granted to Assange.
Washington went to work to replace the Ecuadoran president with Washington’s man. When this object was achieved, Washington’s president of Ecuador revoked the asylum, and on Washington’s orders, the British police seized Assange in the embassy and dragged him into a British maximum security prison, where he has been held in isolation for years while a court case dragged on to decide whether or not he could be extradited to the US.
The judge finally ruled no, but Washington has ordered its British puppet to allow Washington to challenge the ruling. Washington no more respects UK law than Washington respects International law, Russian law, Chinese law, Ukrainian law, and Washington’s British puppet, after faking signs of resistance, will comply.
So what are Washington’s charges against Assange? We don’t really know. Apparently, the charges are based on some treason statute. But Assange is not a US citizen and cannot commit treason against a country of which he is not a citizen or resident. For many years Washington has had a US Attorney working with a Grand Jury to invent charges against Julian Assange. The members of the Grand Jury will, of course, be too stupid to comprehend the issue. As has been said thousands of times, a prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich.
From Washington’s view, Assange’s offense is that he made available documents to the pubic that were made available to Wikileaks apparently by Manning. The documents showed conclusively in an official US video US troops committing war crimes. Wikileaks also published, after carefully vetting them, documents given to Wikileaks that revealed Washington’s lies and deceptions of its dumbshit European, Canadian, and Australian puppets.
To make information available that was withheld from the pubic is what Ellsberg did when he gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which brought about the end of the Vietnam War which was based on nothing more than profits for the US military/security complex. The corrupt US government tried to prosecute Ellsberg, and, had they succeeded, also the New York Times, but the first amendment overruled the concocted and invalid case.
Today Washington’s phony argument is that Assange and Wikileaks are not journalists, but Russian agents, that is, spies working against America. This is blatant nonsense. Moreover, it is a charge that reduces every honest Western journalist, assuming that there are any, to the status of a traitor if he tells the truth against official narratives.
Throughout the Western World there is no honest media. What the West has is a propaganda ministry for the Establishment. The Western presstitutes—a contraction of press prostitutes—deliver the stories that serve the Establishment’s interests. As I have previously said, as a former Wall Street Journal editor and columnist for Business Week and the Script Howard News Service, when I was a Wall Street Journal editor we would not have hired, on grounds of incompetence and absence of integrity, any member today of any TV, print, or NPR “media.” The US media today consists of bought and paid for liars.
In the West today real journalists, other than a few exiled ones, such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Pam Martins, don’t exist. The West lives under a propaganda ministry that suppresses all divergent facts and opinion from the official narratives. The entirety of the Western peoples are locked up in The Matrix, and there is no Neo to rescue them.
The failure of the British courts to stand up to criminal Washington and to release Julian Assange from a decade of wrongful persecution is evidence that the rule of law in the Western world is dead as a door nail. We have reached the point where it is idiocy and self-delusion for any person and any government anywhere in the world to trust anything a Western government or presstitute says.
Once Julian Assange is eliminated, Washington will reel in Russian journalists who are exposed by being located in the US, and they too will be destroyed along with independent journalists on the Internet.
Perhaps fearing that fate, Sputnik and RT pull their punches and repeat Washington’s lies in order to lower their profiles. We get some truth from them, but not all of it.
Americans, and I think Russians and Chinese, will never comprehend that Washington is the center of evil in the Universe. Washington has been practicing evil for decades, and the evil is now reaching heights never before experienced.
Before the year is out, nearly $10 trillion may have been added to the national debt from all the spending done by a “bipartisan” majority in the Imperial City.
Critics condemn them for saddling future generations with inconceivable debt. But it’s far worse than that. The damage is being done NOW — to US. It will destroy us, and in the process wipe out any possibility of a future for those generations 50 or 100 years down the road.
The reason is not just the spending; it’s what the government is actually DOING. Under the guise of an “infrastrucuture” bill, the legislation does things like mandate the elimination of fossil fuels on the highway within a decade. What do you think that will do, not just to personal travel, but to the ability of businesses to transport food and medical supplies? It doesn’t happen by accident, or by magic. And it will take more than magic or accident to restore the damage done when millions of people suffer, or even die, once these mandates take place.
One U.S. Senator from Tennessee commented that the “infrastructure” bill is longer than the Bible sitting on his desk — considerably longer. Nobody reads the legislation they’re passing or signing (do you think Biden has?), and nobody is expected to read it. Congress is doing far worse than merely spending like drunken sailors. They’re running up debt that would sober up the worst heroin addict. It’s incomprehensible in its insanity. Inflation continues to go up. Why? Because when the government electronically “prints” more money it does not have, the value of the currency declines. This is how all economies collapse. We’re at a very real risk not just for restoring the double-digit inflation of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years of the 70s, which followed a spending spree (nothing compared to the current one) by Congress in the 1960s; we’re already back in that territory. We’re in real danger of triggering hyperinflation, the kind of currency-busting collapse that destroyed the Weimar republic in Germany (paving the way for Hitler), or that destroyed the fairly robust economy in Venezuela more recently (paving the way for the Communism and pet-eating starvation occurring there now).
I look at all the arrogant, ignorant people who watch CNN, who vote for every Democrat they can find (AOC or Bernie Sanders for President would suit them just fine), and I think: How can otherwise fairly reasonable and intelligent people be so CLUELESS? How can they be THIS ignorant of what they have endorsed and created? They move along, whistling inside their masks, assuming their great-grandchildren will live far better off than they and their children today. How could it ever all go away? This is America! The socialist republic of America, that is. Their sense of patriotism is not liberty and freedom; their sense of patriotism is a war against facts and reality, including a delusion that socialism, which has failed everywhere it’s tried, will somehow work THIS time, in America … if we can just shut up the dissenters.
Life is not supposed to be about misery and suffering. Each of us, in our individual lives, will encounter enough challenges without the government and the culture doing everything it can to bring every one of us down, and making all of us (aside from an elite, connected minority) miserable, for the rest of our days. I hardly know what to say, at this point. It all begs for a moment of silence, as a memorial to what once was, what might have been and (today) what never had to be. In 2019, America had reached a high point. And then it killed itself — seemingly, inexplicably. The suicide is happening right before our eyes. Half of us grasp it (or at least sense it); and half of us scream that while we’re done with Trump, we have to find a way to exterminate the non-socialist, the non-mask-wearing and the unvaccinated ASAP.
Increasingly, there’s not much left to say. Most of the damage has already been inflicted. Now we await the results — most of us clueless. And, as the ship goes down, the innocent — the wealth-creating business owners, the Trump “deplorables”, the lovers of liberty and rationality, and (of course) the unvaccinated — will get all of the blame. The real perpetrators will get no blame.
At its best, there’s nothing like human nature. You get scientific breakthroughs, innovations in business and technology, amazing inventions and the United States of America. At its worst, I used to say, you get Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Now we can add to that phrase: At its worst, you get Biden’s sinking America.
The Biden Administration’s effort to withdraw nearly all US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq before the end of the year is commendable and it is hoped that a departure from Syria will follow soon thereafter, but one must nevertheless be concerned that the overseas moves are being made to concentrate government resources on the domestic war that has already begun. I am, of course, referring to the ongoing efforts being made to extirpate “extremists” among American citizens who have been further identified as largely consisting of “white supremacists.”
As part of the new war, ideas or even demonstrable facts that are considered to be undesirable are being targeted by the government working together with internet resources, most particularly the social media, to attack critics. It is being argued that the alleged provision of “misinformation” is doing actual harm to the country and the American people. Recently, much of the focus has been on the COVID virus, in support of the government’s intention to have all Americans vaccinated and, increasingly, again compelled to be masked when inside buildings that are accessible to the public. These efforts are being supported by media including Facebook, which features pop-ups directing the reader to a “safe” site whenever a piece appears that challenges the government orthodoxy on the spread of the virus.
One might reasonably argue that there is a national public health crisis that is part of a global problem which requires coordinated government intervention, but the actual statistics that reveal the existing low levels of infection and death in most states would not support that contention. And one might also observe that the growing problem involving the regulation of speech and even ideas by government working in cooperation with large corporations is potentially more serious than COVID or any other virus.
If the United States government and its corporate partners were in an honest way trying to protect the American people one might at least be sympathetic regarding the efforts being made, but both government and businesses have proven to be serial liars and purveyors of egregious untruths to serve their own agendas. Recently, the White House spokesman Jen Psaki suggested that those spreading false information about COVID vaccinations might well be banned from spreading such lies on social media. The implication was that the government could compile lists of such “extremists” and use its regulatory authority to compel companies on the internet to censor individuals and groups in compliance with orders coming from the White House. The justification would be that government in this case gets a pass on limiting free speech and association due to a national health crisis.
Psaki has undoubtedly discovered a certain benevolence in big government which few Americans have noted before. Foreigners, however, being on the receiving end of wars resulting from the stream of lies emanating from Washington might well have a different viewpoint. President Bill Clinton relied on a false narrative to go to war in the Balkans and then used unprovoked attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan to draw attention away from an affair he was having with an intern. George W. Bush and his pack of neocon scoundrels, most of whom are still holding prestigious positions, used what was known to be fake information to justify destroying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama lied to overthrow the governments in Libya and Ukraine while also attempting to do the same in Syria.
All lies, all the time, and now we Americans are supposed to believe that the Biden Administration is seeking to benefit us? Online one wag quipped that “The party that believes that men can get pregnant now wants to control ‘misinformation’ on the internet?” Never forget that policies that compel all Americans to behave in certain ways, no matter how innocent in appearance, can also be used and expanded upon to mandate something more sinister.
And what about the social media companies? Facebook has long had a censorship group headed by a former Israeli government official. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to Congress that Facebook suppresses nearly all so-called “hate speech” automatically using computer algorithms that rely on word associations to determine what is allowed on the site. Pieces that are considered borderline are allowed only limited exposure, having their distribution among contacts automatically restricted and disabling sharing. Google search uses similar algorithms to make sure that sites and individuals that it does not approve of do not appear among search results. It also uses software to actually “re-direct” users away from sites that it does not approve.
And now PayPal, owned by online auction service eBay and an essential tool for small public interest groups’ support, has now announced that it will henceforth be working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to “fight hate” by cutting off financing of extremist groups. But its definition of “hate,” criticized as highly subjective and inclined to condemn groups disliked by ADL for political reasons, has prompted legitimate concerns about where this all is going. ADL has often been criticized for finding hate virtually everywhere, particularly among conservative white groups. RT cites a recent example of such fervor “in response to an article published in Canada’s National Post, which was denounced by the ADL because its author mentioned that one of the 32 US lawmakers supporting a tax reform belonged to a Jewish fraternity.” In short, any discussion of Israel or of the behavior of Jewish individuals and groups in anything but a positive context will be considered “hate” by ADL and PayPal.
Indeed, PayPal and ADL issued a self-serving statement last week which said “PayPal and ADL will focus on further uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements,” adding that they would also go after “actors and networks spreading and profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.”
The joint venture will also include the “launch[ing] of a research effort” to determine how “extremist and hate movements throughout the US are attempting to leverage financial platforms to fund criminal activity.” The negative information collected will be shared with police, financial services, and the government, presumably to create an environment where such groups will be marginalized and shut out of the public space completely, to include possibly having their supporters arrested, charged and convicted.
The growing collusion between big government and large public-accessible online information and opinion services is not a good thing. It permits those well-funded and politically connected organizations to work together to limit what the public is allowed to know. Its zeal to eliminate “misinformation” is misplaced, replacing dissident voices that have limited access to a wider audience with massive agenda driven public-private organizations that will essentially determine what is acceptable and what is not. If allowed to continue, it will be the death of free speech in this country as everything that disagrees with the approved narrative will be labeled “hateful” or “extremist,” eventually to include criminal penalties for those who disagree. It is not too much to suggest that we are witnessing the first steps in the creation of a totalitarian de facto one-party state. Perhaps that is the intention.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
You can’t be a free country unless the great majority of the people WANT to be free.
If the majority of people want to take other people’s money — or to accept money from the government based on fiat currency debt, which was never earned by anyone — then the majority of people will become dependent on that government. The government becomes its “sugar daddy”. The relationship between the government and the people will be no different than the relationship between a “kept” wife and her husband. It will be cynical, lacking in respect, lacking in authentic loyalty. Each side will know the other has compromised his or her basic character, and each side knows the other is living a sham — and knows that he or she knows it.
That’s the state we’re in today. If it wasn’t true before 2020, that year surely marked the tipping point. The government now pays members of the job market to stay home. The government matches and slightly surpasses the “market” rate, giving people who stay home no economic reason to leave. Their character rots, their sense of independence and motivation decay, and the government exploits these weaknesses more and more, for as long as it can. Thousands of businesses struggle to survive without employees, and as those businesses falter and collapse, their former owners become dependent on the government too. It’s a brilliant racket.
Because the government is based upon fraud, deceit and the moral/psychological decay of its victims, it cannot carry itself on with even the minimal strength of a sugar daddy relationship. Eventually it will resort to raw fear, intimidation and brute force. While in its weakened position that government and former sugar daddy will be in a better position to be challenged, the people it has undermined will be in less of a position to challenge it than ever before. This explains the hold of Soviet Russia on its Communist victims for generations, and the continued hold that North Korea, China, Cuba and Venezuela have over their people today: They have been conditioned into subservience.
The tragic error made by Americans of both parties was the assumption that “it can’t happen here.” Whenever you see people interviewed after a natural disaster or medical crisis, they’ll always say something like, “You think it can’t happen to you. But it can, and it does.” America was a special and unprecedented place. But it was never an impossible place. The only thing that makes it impossible now is the increasing unwillingness of a growing number of people to separate themselves from their sugar daddy. On both sides, I see and sense a resignation to the inevitability of government control over every aspect of our lives. People who oppose the lockdowns created by government panic resign themselves to the payments offered in compensation for those lockdowns. They see themselves as having little choice other than complying with “vaccinations”, allegiance to woke ideas and the forthcoming mandatory green revolution which will destroy capitalism and industrial civilization as we have known it since the 1800s at least.
Nothing is inevitable. Human beings will always have free choice. As totalitarianism overtakes our society, people will remain free to fight it. The fight will be much, much harder than it would have been earlier. But it’s too late for that part. We’re all underground now, unless we choose to comply with not just lockdowns, but with everything from critical race theory and felony imprisonment for calling someone by the incorrect pronoun. Senator Rand Paul recently made the astute comment, in favor of resistance against the government, that they cannot jail ALL of us. That’s so true. But too many of us want the imprisonment, especially when under the delusion that it’s a sugar daddy who will take care of us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Many will soon learn, the hard way, that the sugar daddy doesn’t come by his wealth honestly; and the manner to which you have become accustomed cannot go on forever.
Before the year is out, nearly $10 trillion may have been added to the national debt from all the spending done by a “bipartisan” majority in the Imperial City.
Critics condemn them for saddling future generations with inconceivable debt. But it’s far worse than that. The damage is being done NOW — to US. It will destroy us, and in the process wipe out any possibility of a future for those generations 50 or 100 years down the road.
The reason is not just the spending; it’s what the government is actually DOING. Under the guise of an “infrastrucuture” bill, the legislation does things like mandate the elimination of fossil fuels on the highway within a decade. What do you think that will do, not just to personal travel, but to the ability of businesses to transport food and medical supplies? It doesn’t happen by accident, or by magic. And it will take more than magic or accident to restore the damage done when millions of people suffer, or even die, once these mandates take place.
One U.S. Senator from Tennessee commented that the “infrastructure” bill is longer than the Bible sitting on his desk — considerably longer. Nobody reads the legislation they’re passing or signing (do you think Biden has?), and nobody is expected to read it. Congress is doing far worse than merely spending like drunken sailors. They’re running up debt that would sober up the worst heroin addict. It’s incomprehensible in its insanity. Inflation continues to go up. Why? Because when the government electronically “prints” more money it does not have, the value of the currency declines. This is how all economies collapse. We’re at a very real risk not just for restoring the double-digit inflation of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years of the 70s, which followed a spending spree (nothing compared to the current one) by Congress in the 1960s; we’re already back in that territory. We’re in real danger of triggering hyperinflation, the kind of currency-busting collapse that destroyed the Weimar republic in Germany (paving the way for Hitler), or that destroyed the fairly robust economy in Venezuela more recently (paving the way for the Communism and pet-eating starvation occurring there now).
I look at all the arrogant, ignorant people who watch CNN, who vote for every Democrat they can find (AOC or Bernie Sanders for President would suit them just fine), and I think: How can otherwise fairly reasonable and intelligent people be so CLUELESS? How can they be THIS ignorant of what they have endorsed and created? They move along, whistling inside their masks, assuming their great-grandchildren will live far better off than they and their children today. How could it ever all go away? This is America! The socialist republic of America, that is. Their sense of patriotism is not liberty and freedom; their sense of patriotism is a war against facts and reality, including a delusion that socialism, which has failed everywhere it’s tried, will somehow work THIS time, in America … if we can just shut up the dissenters.
Life is not supposed to be about misery and suffering. Each of us, in our individual lives, will encounter enough challenges without the government and the culture doing everything it can to bring every one of us down, and making all of us (aside from an elite, connected minority) miserable, for the rest of our days. I hardly know what to say, at this point. It all begs for a moment of silence, as a memorial to what once was, what might have been and (today) what never had to be. In 2019, America had reached a high point. And then it killed itself — seemingly, inexplicably. The suicide is happening right before our eyes. Half of us grasp it (or at least sense it); and half of us scream that while we’re done with Trump, we have to find a way to exterminate the non-socialist, the non-mask-wearing and the unvaccinated ASAP.
Increasingly, there’s not much left to say. Most of the damage has already been inflicted. Now we await the results — most of us clueless. And, as the ship goes down, the innocent — the wealth-creating business owners, the Trump “deplorables”, the lovers of liberty and rationality, and (of course) the unvaccinated — will get all of the blame. The real perpetrators will get no blame.
At its best, there’s nothing like human nature. You get scientific breakthroughs, innovations in business and technology, amazing inventions and the United States of America. At its worst, I used to say, you get Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Now we can add to that phrase: At its worst, you get Biden’s sinking America.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 