…….

…….

What’s coming down the pipe

It’s been two days since this was Tweeted:

 

The comments and quote Tweets keep coming.

I’ve seen threads about this.

Almost every single one has been a “fuck you, no” followed by list of damages and grievances by those harmed by COVID lockdowns.

I’ve seen the phrase “crossed the Rubicon” a lot in describing what the state did to the people.

The anger by those who suffered against those who caused the suffering will not be satiated with elections and ballots.

The only thing that will curb this is blood.

Either proper Nuremberg type trials that put the lead Covidians in Federal prison, seizes their wealth, and runs them; or the people will move in the direction of frontier justice.

Live and let live will not be an option.

I see what’s coming down the pipe and it looks copper jacketed.

 

Changing the Narrative

Years ago my daughter and I were discussing the Constitution and I asked her to quote the second amendment.  She picked up her history/social studies text book and read it to me from the back of the book.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the militia will not be infringed”.

I freaked.  I knew that was wrong.  So I actually looked in her text book and it indeed had the second like that, but with “[in the militia]” in brackets added.

My daughter, a highschool student, thought that the words in brackets were part of the second amendment.  I had to pull up a real copy of the constitution on my laptop in order to prove to her that somebody had added those words.  That it wasn’t in the original.

The next day I started calling around and finally ended up talking to the superintendent of the school district.  He told me “The students know that brackets indicated words that were added.  We added the words to help clarify the meaning. ”  He went on to indicate that they had added words throughout the constitution.

When I reviewed the text book I found one other added word [of] and it did not change the meaning of the phrase.  But there were multiple words added to the2nd.  The children reading that textbook would have no way of knowing that they were not reading the correct translation.

Most students entering high school today can’t read the constitution.  They do not read cursive.  They have to trust that the version they have is a true copy, just using block or typeset characters. This will become a bigger issue over time. “He who controls the past controls the future.”

[Darcy] Geissler [of Fairfax County, Virginia] told the principal directly in an email, “When I was in law school, our first assignment on persuasive writing – a skill necessary to be a lawyer – was on whether or not a misspelling in a deed was sufficient to pass title. Not exactly a sexy or emotional issue. We were not handed Roe v. Wade, the 2nd Amendment, or climate change, even though we were law students with significant education and life experience.”

“The reason we were not given hot-button issues when first learning to write was because in order to learn persuasive writing, it is imperative that the skill not be clouded by the issue before the skill is learned,”

The problem is that everything in the education industry is geared to messaging.  In some cases this is good.  In k-5 what this means is that a lesson in math is used in reading is used in history and back again.  It is designed to teach basic skills and to help the student learn from those base lessons.

Unfortunately, today there is a different narrative being pushed.  Not to get children to think, to analyze critically the information they are given, but to instead think the way that the industry (and teacher) want the child to think.

In a YAF talk, Michael Knowles spoke about “groomers”.  The point he made was that if a 8 year old boy tells his teacher that he is really a girl and he is going to use the girls bathroom from now on, the teacher/school has to make a choice.  Regardless of the choice they are going to be teaching a narrative.  They can teach the woke narrative that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, or they can teach the boy that “no you aren’t a girl, use the correct bathroom.”

For us, it isn’t a difficult choice, for many on the left, it isn’t a difficult choice.  The problem is that we have different answers and the education industry is filled with leftist.

The schools spend many learning hours per year teaching students how to respond if the fire alarm goes off.  Yet somehow they manage to do it without creating soul crushing fear in the students.

Today they spend as much or more time teaching children how to respond to “active shooter”. And they have managed to instill terror in students and parents alike.

At the local high school a student was recently removed by the police during the school day.  The boy had been playing airsoft with some friends.  One of those “friends” snapped a picture of him holding an AR-15 airsoft rifle.  That “friend” then added text to it something like “I can’t stand it, I’m going to bring my rifle to school and see just how many I can kill before they stop me.”

It was a prank.  Yet everybody knows about it and there was panic within the school system.  And kids were scared.  This is not the way to live.

The narrative thus is “guns are bad unless you are a Hollywood Actor shooting up people in the movies”.  Only the cops are good enough to carry guns.  Only the military should have arms.  6 rounds is ok but 7 is a killing machine.  A 10 round magazine is “safe” an eleven round magazine is only for killers.

The cops need 18 round magazines with two reloads but you can do it with just 5 rounds.

Nothing makes any real sense but the narrative goes on and on.  Always evoking fear to get people to give up just one more bit of freedom.

So Facebook finally nuked me

It did not matter that I asked for a review on a content they found offensive the second they “temporarily” suspended and then a couple of times more, they simply kept the bullshit that I did not ask for a review, they went ahead and killed it.

And of course, I would never start a duplicate account and behave the same way I was behaving. Nah, Nevah!

 

Tuesday Tunes

It is the summer in late 60’s. Two kindergarten boys roll down the slope between their houses and come to a stop. They climb back to the top and look up at the beautiful blue sky. They pant from running around the yards playing cowboys and indians.

One of them turns to the other and says “What are you going to do when you are drafted? Are you going to Vietnam or are you going to Canada?”

The other boy thinks hard, “Dad is in the Navy. I’m going to join up and be an officer like him.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might go to Canada.”

War just was. Two young boys discussing what they were going to do in 13 years when they were drafted to go fight in a war that the government refused to call a war. A war that had been going on for decades, even before the US got involved.

The media was peddling the same narratives, the US military was evil. That our soldiers committed atrocities on a regular basis. Just a few years later, in April of 1971, John Kerry, future presidential candidate, testifies in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the horrible atrocities he witnessed.

At every turn the media delivered a story of failure.

Still a young boy was ready to go to war to defend his country. He didn’t understand all those big words, but his father was fighting for his country and he would go do his father and his country proud.

A small truth that is forgotten, an 18 year old man drafted and sent to Vietnam in this time period had a better chance of living than his civilian counterpart back in the states. Car safety was not as good as it is today. Many young men lost their lives on the streets and highways of this country. More per capita than lost their lives in Vietnam.

Please don’t misunderstand me, war is horrible. It does things to the body and mind that most, thankfully, will never experience and few will understand. I still thank those vets when I meet them. I’ve talked to them when the war was still fresh in their minds. I have huge respect for those that fought and continue to fight for our country.

Note also that my respect is for those that fight for our country, not all that are members of the military fight for our country.

Brazil is in a little upheaval.

Convicted criminal and Left Winger (but I repat myself) Lula Da Silva, apparently managed to squeeze over President Bolsonaro by the thinnest or margins. Both sides took to the streets and not for the better.

Bolsonaro fans have been blocking roads… and that is pretty much what US Media is showing:

Supporters of Lula are also celebrating on their own way. Nice people, aren’t they?

FAFO

And the standard Latin-American response is on the way:

Brazil is gonna be very interesting for a few days.

Their protestations for mercy fall on deaf ears

 

The article linked in the Tweet:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too.

No.

I remember how those of us who were not Covidians, who did not blindly obey every Fauci pronouncement, were dehumanized.

I remember how pundits and opinionated assholes celebrated the deaths of the unvaccinated.

How they called those of us who resisted masking murderers and should be denied any form of health care and left to die in the streets.

I remember how they cursed us for wanted to put our kids back in school.

We on this blog have systematically cataloged all the destruction they caused.

Setting kids back years.

The cancers and other diseases that went untreated in hospitals that shut down for the COVID wave that never came.

The deaths from overdose and despair from people locked away.

The businesses that shut down and the business owners that went bankrupt.

In the end we were vindicated.

They narrative has collapsed.

What they did caused more harm to children than it did good.

They vaccines were useless to stop the spread and vaccine policies did more harm than good.

They destroyed the economy and caused the worst inflation in generations.

Had we done nothing in reaction to COVID we’d be better off.

Those who were going to get it and die did, regardless of lock downs and mask mandates.

Perhaps more lives would have been saved had drugs like Ivermectin not become political footballs.

And now that we know they everything they did caused pain and suffering beyond our ability to quantity it and didn’t save one life, they want amnesty and forgiveness.

No.

I want retribution.

I want them to suffer for how they made us suffer.

I want ditches filled with the bodies of Covidisns.

And if you read the replies to that Tweet, I am not alone.

Amnesty is the worst think they could ask for.

It will only make us madder.

When justice fails, people will take it into their own hands.

We can either have truth and reconciliation or we can have frontier justice.

But what we can’t have is the people who caused this mess to be forgiven and to maintain the status quo.

Link Dump