phoenixvoice
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Dr D: And some will have turned out okay and work and stay here, as always.
But it always comes back to free stuff they didn’t work for.
This is a good point. There are a handful of people that I have gotten to know pretty well while living in Phoenix whom I suspect don’t have their documents in order. All of them work very hard, and their status does not bother me in the least. Two did receive some “freebies.” For one, it was education of the children, both those born here and born elsewhere and free healthcare for the children born here. (I don’t know if they always utilized the free healthcare — it may have just been when a child born here fell and broke a bone and required care that was beyond the family’s ability to pay.). The other was a woman in her sixties, still working very hard, who received steeply discounted healthcare.
Also, I think it is important to remember that “sanctuary cities” originally became a thing due to practical necessities of operating on a city level — not because of partisanship. Once people are living in cities, it can become problematic when there is a sizable sub-population that is terrified of coming in contact with the police, fire department & paramedics, and city officials. This fear can lead to crime being tolerated and people being abused. Local officials wanted to be able to come in contact with the undocumented living there so that they could deal with realities on the ground. Originally, sanctuary cities were not about supplying freebies to the undocumented.
As it is, it is the feds who are creating these problems, and, ultimately, the cities and localities who have to deal with it.
Ah, the California required high school health class. When I attended high school it also included driver’s Ed, warnings about illegal drug use, sex ed, info on STDs, and I took it in 10th grade. It has always been on the cutting edge of the social mores current to high school students. One day, my teacher asked the students: “Okay — so how much does it cost to buy a joint?” Several in the class knew the answer: “2 dollars.” Another day, the teacher came wearing dangly earrings made of condoms still sealed in the individual packaging. The teacher was an older woman, in her early sixties, gruff, plump — a short bear of a woman, like you would expect driving a school bus.
By the time most 9th graders are reaching this health class, they are already well-versed in these terms. They probably first encountered them from peers and/or social media by age five or six or seven. The California high school health class is merely formalizing what is already out there. If parents think that they are going to stop their children from galloping down lgbtqi paths by handcuffing teachers and school administrators, they are sorely mistaken. It’s like locking the paddock door after the horse has already left the stable. That isn’t to say that schools should be hiding children’s lgbtqi “identities” from parents — that is a huge folly — and maybe the parents don’t realize that the schools have to figure out some tolerant way of dealing with trans expression because that is what is going on in the classrooms and on the playgrounds.
Parents can restrict and monitor their kids’ access to devices and the internet — but many parents do not do this, or the controls are lax — and the kids who don’t encounter these ideas online will get it from their peers who are online. Even my sister’s homeschooled kids are displaying behavior that suggests that they have run across lgbtqi ideas that are contrary to their Mormon faith.
Yesterday, at the grocery store a toddler was complaining to his mother because he didn’t want to sit in the cart’s seat. She kept remonstrating him in Spanish, that he had to stay there, that he had misbehaved and was not permitted to get down. The child continued to complain, vociferously. I passed them again about 5 minutes later, and the child was watching YouTube on the mother’s phone. The mother had peace. Oh, how tempting it is to pacify a child in this way. How exhausting it is to deal with a child’s unrelenting complaints. Don’t I know. (On long trips I always let the kids watch videos — the contention otherwise was more than I could bear.) And parents of older children don’t want to acknowledge that by allowing YouTube to parent their children, that their children have adopted the values promulgated by social media, rather than the values of their biological parents. It is so much easier to just blame the schools.
The public schools have created a fad among children that the thing to do is to change one’s sex.
I noticed that even in Plato’s day that the elders were bemoaning the state of the education being given to he children. Has there ever been a time when a sizable portion of the adult population was not complaining about the sorry state of formal education?
Now, granted, perhaps the public schools in California are preaching gender bender ideas to kids—I don’t live there, so I can’t say. I live in Arizona, and here the schools are *not* preaching non-traditional gender ideas, nor are they making a big deal out of LGBT, etc. And yet, the kids are ingesting these memes anyhow, and regurgitating them back up in colorful genders and sexual orientations and DID. Where do the ideas come from? From peers and social media — TikTok obsession is the source in the case of my daughter’s 16 year old step-sister with cerebral palsy. My daughter observed how this girl began watching a certain flavor of TikTok videos, and a few weeks later suddenly announced that she was a boy. Perhaps parents blame the schools because then they don’t have to take responsibility for the pastimes of their children — they don’t have to bother monitoring the media that their children consume?
@ oxy — it looks like an abrupt shift to a “keto” diet just caused my father’s recently diagnosed prostate cancer to go into dormant status after only 4 weeks of the diet. His urologist was ecstatic; the oncologist (who would have been administering radiation therapy) was not impressed.
Sometimes I think that if the data from Dr. Berg and others is not as easily accessible that may not be tragic — underground knowledge has often flourished in odd spaces through people-to-people contact. And some people will just have to get off their couches and learn to use their technology a little better so that they can find the information that they want. Actually causing people to exert more effort to get what they want could have some very beneficial consequences.
Maybe the government in Argentina claims to be socialist? When I was there, in the 90s, (as a Mormon missionary,) I spoke with a great deal of common people. Sometimes they talked about politics. I saw an angry protest about something one evening, but the crowd’s mood was negative, so ducked down a different street and went another way. Many people still loved Eva Peron. And I don’t recall anyone — ANYONE — talking about socialism or capitalism. (If they had, it would have interested me.). I did hear about the current president who (according to what I was told — I’ve never corroborated any of it) had converted to Catholicism in order to become president, and after his inauguration the law was changed so that it was no longer required that the Argentinian president be Catholic. And I noticed that voting was a legal requirement — everyone voted, or faced a fine.
I don’t think that “capitalism” and “ socialism” are very apt monikers of any “really existing” economic system. IF we define “socialism” as government regulation of the economy and “capitalism” as lack of government regulation on the economy, we find that nearly all economic systems (whether well-functioning or not) have the government regulating the economy in a multitude of ways. The tendency is that the more powerful a government is, the more regulating it does of the economy. My observation is that it isn’t the raw quantity of government regulation of the economy that determines how well the economy runs. (And there could be arguments about what a “well-run” economy actually IS — which usually has to do with who is benefitting and in what way.) Economies that promote social mobility (merit-based), build the middle class, compress wealth stratification, and reduce poverty (some fashion of safety net) have mechanisms that make it relatively easy for wealth and resources to be obtained and retained by the masses. We don’t have that in the US right now, Argentina did not have that in the 90s (and it seems to have continued not to have it.).
As far as *how* to achieve the economy that I just described? Well, that is the question du jour. But I promise you that pure laissez faire capitalism isn’t going to be the magic bullet and neither is any flavor of communism nor socialism as it has ever been practiced by the former USSR or Europe or Argentina. It might be helpful to study the US economy of the 1950s and the Chinese economy of the past 40 years. (I loathe the totalitarianism that exists in China, but one of the primary reasons why the Chinese tend to go with it is because the economic prospects of the masses in China has greatly improved during recent decades.). I don’t think that we are going to be able to replicate the US economy of the 1950s, but if we understand it, we may be able create the right environment for something similar. (I’d rather endure the McCarthy era of the US than the social scoring system of modern China. But maybe they aren’t as different as I think?)
Calling Argentina “socialist” seems somewhat weird, as in, okay, “socialist” in what way exactly? (Socialism can mean radically different things to different people.). Granted, I haven’t been there in about 25 years, but I lived in Bueno Aires from 1995-1997. In that time period it was apparent that:
– they don’t have city zoning laws like in the US. People in the city neighborhoods would take a street-facing window, put up a “kiosko” sign and open up a tiny “convenience store” in a residential neighborhood.
– there didn’t appear to be much required in the way of building permits. I lived in a brand new apartment for a few months that had a water pipe slowly pushing its way out of a cement wall. I realized that the wiring of the light above the metal medicine cabinet was not properly shielded and got zapped with electricity a couple of times when the bathroom was filled with water vapor. (220 – yikes!). Bathroom didn’t have a window or fan either. And people would build second and third storeys, as they pleased, on top of their concrete homes.
– There didn’t seem to be much available as a “social safety net.” People I spoke with constantly asked if I knew of any work. I met an older couple living in a middle class neighborhood in a home that they appeared to own — that had all of the utilities shut off for lack of payment. There was a family of four that had been middle class — he lost his job and then used his car to work for a private taxi service. Then his car was stolen, and he had to make less money driving a car owned by the taxi service — the family was desperate.
– Schools seemed to mostly be private, as in parents paid for their kids to attend. (It also may have been that the public schools were so awful that even impoverished families would do their best to pay to send their children to private schools.)
– If there was some socialized medicine, it was not adequate, and didn’t appear to cover medicines — at least, not those sold in the pharmacies.
– If there were laws protecting workers, they were not robust or were not enforced. I met a family from Bolivia who ran a sweatshop that sewed clothes, people who were less well off than the family worked for them. The family’s 5 year old boy liked drinking sugar sweetened milk and his teeth were rotting — and they apparently did not have the money to take the boy to a dentist. I met a young man who worked 12 hour shifts in a factory, one week at night, one week during the day — and he was grateful for the job.So…again I ask…Argentina socialist? By what metric?
Tedros isn’t vaxxed against Covid…that is HILARIOUS. Of course he has to put a moral superiority spin on it. The cheek.
@ AsIfTruth
how do you rectify your beliefs about the empire and simultaneously pay them tribute with your tax dollars
I have paid nothing in federal income tax for years because I have kids to support and my income is well below the federal poverty limit. Of course, I pay into social security and Medicare. It isn’t like I have much choice. I understand the arguments against the federal individual income tax. I believe that they have merit. The question begins to be: am I willing to risk problems with the IRS by not paying the federal income tax that is due? That is an uncomfortable question — and one that I have not had to face for many years. (When I was last an employee, I didn’t understand the issues the way that I do now.). I wish that there were a way to assign taxes to what I want them to cover — things like roads, the borders, programs to help all sorts of regular people, veterans benefits, etc. And I think that one way to improve the situation would be for the federal government to get out of the business of programs to help people out, and for those programs to be the domain of states, counties, and cities — with the local governments collecting the taxes required for such programs, not the feds. (Yes, there will still be corruption with local programs, but at least the corruption will be closer to home, and it is easier to connect the dots to uncover the corruption.)I think that the easy answer to the question is inherent in the question itself — calling “taxes” “tribute.” Historically, folks were not thrilled to be paying tribute, but did so anyhow because they didn’t want to face the adverse consequences of not paying it.
All of the comments here regarding 9/11 remind me of why I peruse this site daily. It is refreshing to see all of the questions and problems regarding 9/11 brought up. There are some that I hadn’t before considered. Back in 2001 I saw the TV footage of the buildings falling, and even without specialized knowledge of how such towers are created,
I thought it was fishy that they had fallen in just the same manner as I had seen in old reels of buildings being formally demolished. I thought to myself: okay, I’m not an expert, I’ll see what comes of this. So I read an article months later in Time or Newsweek (don’t recall which) that spoke of how the fire caused the buildings to collapse, and I thought: that doesn’t really sound right, it doesn’t explain what I *saw*. I read stuff on the internet, naysayers who poked holes in the official narrative, talking about thermite residue, the temperature at which jet fuel burns and the temperature required to melt steel. I read about shady things — stuff going on in places destroyed on 9/11 that very important people may have wanted to halt, people who presciently decided to go to work late that day. I saw how 9/11 was used as pretext for war and the Patriot Act. Nothing clear coalesced — I still don’t know exactly who was responsible for 9/11. But I *know* that the 9/11 “official narrative” is more rotten than a 8-week old, never-been-refrigerated egg with a crack in the shell. (And if you are curious just how rotten that is…try it deliberately some time.)“During the Great Depression…” the unemployment was extreme — I wonder how average salary was computed?
I think it would be really interesting to get the figures on Sep 1, 1929, right before the stock market crash.Aspnaz, yesterday
We all know that people only behave well when there are checks on their behaviour, feedback that benefits them behave better.This statement is too exclusionary to be accurate, too over-simplified. Many people behave the way that they were trained to behave as children. As adults, they continue with the conditioning that was laid into them as children, and will only shift and change if life puts enormous pressure on them. Personally, I continued to behave kindly towards my ex husband during the marriage — as I had been trained to treat people kindly, in all circumstances — even when his behavior was atrocious. I did eventually kick him out of the home with an order of protection, but I warned him before I did so that if he drank alcohol one more time that an order of protection would follow. I suppose that he was so accustomed to me putting up with his crap that he didn’t believe me, or he was too mixed up in the head to think it through. I had to learn to set boundaries when dealing with other people, because the boundary setting in the home of my childhood was lax — we were trained to be kind, and kind people are circumspect and harsh boundaries were not required. The benefits from boundary-setting are often delayed — the initial result may be a worsening if the immediate situation.
Humans often behave in accordance with principles and values which exist on a higher level of thought than rats pushing a lever to get food or heroin. This is why although the masses can be strongly influenced by bread, it also takes “circuses” — distractions, ways to befuddle their minds and confuse their thinking.
JB-hb yesterday
It is one of our inscrutable unspoken cultural rules in the West:“They’re just like us” applied to all sorts of situations
This is accurate. And foolish. It is where the Golden Rule falls apart — sometimes, others simply don’t want what I want. (I think of the Golden Rule as a jumping off point for understanding another human—it isn’t an endpoint.).
In spite of this, the beauty of Enlightenment thinking is that in spite of differences between humans we say that “before the law” or “in God’s eyes” each human has value, “is created equal,” and therefore should be treated with respect and equality in how the law is applied. These Enlightenment ideas help minimize the human tendency of treating those who are different as sub-human.
@ oxymoron
There are different levels of thought — Bloom’s taxonomy comes to mind. Great human thinkers have an important place in society — they can move us forward, they can inspire us to bring out our best. (I think about Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Rev Martin Luther King Jr, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Einstein, Galileo and so many other names.). Sometimes, human societies reject great thinkers — Socrates comes to mind. However, the role of great thinkers is not to think for the masses, is not to rule the masses, rather it is to show the masses what is possible, to inspire the masses to share in novel ideas or elevated ideas or better ideas. Some humans, when they realize what is possible through study & thought, take that path themselves, becoming innovative thinkers, artists, scientists, etc.
When the self-proclaimed “thinking” ubermenschen face a democratically organized system that is resistant to their demands, these “ubermenschen” will find that in order to exert any power and influence they must communicate with and seek to understand those whom they have labeled “deplorable.” This is, actually, the source of Trump’s political power — he voices the concerns of a huge chunk of the masses. This may, potentially, buoy RFK to the presidency, if other events come into alignment (such as the Biden corruption becoming a public scandal that threatens the integrity of the Democratic Party.)
When leaders seek to understand those that they lead, the result is often empathy, compassion, and a flowering of human creativity. Followers find true mentors, and leaders find significance in their efforts. Both are edified.
Re Oxymoron https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/introduction-part-2
The idea that “most people” will not, cannot, or choose not to “think” is very dangerous, and a path that I would tread with great caution. It very quickly leads to social bifurcation, where one (smaller) strata of society sees it self as “ubermenschen”, morally obligated to rule over “untermenschen.” Whether the castes are based upon “quality of internal dialogue,” or status at birth, or color of skin, or “gayness,” or social class, or language of birth, etc., is unimportant; the end result is the same.
The product of the Enlightenment, enshrined in the US Constitution and other governments respecting the concept of democracy (rule by the people), is the idea that people can and should rule themselves. We spit on the graves of those who have lived and died furthering these ideas when we categorically deny large segments of the population enfranchisement. If large segments of the population are not bothering to critically think about issues beyond their immediate life, might it be because they are exhausted just trying to live day to day, or dealing with trauma regularly, or have been hoodwinked by advertising and propaganda specially designed to lull them into complacency and distraction? It’s the ubermenschen acting to create the conditions in the untermenschen that will morally justify the ubermenschen’s seizure of power.
Dogs in hospitals….
Allowed? Yes, however, there must be caveats.
There is a great deal of variation from dog to dog in their level of socialization and training.
Patients themselves are not always well enough to care for the dog. Dogs don’t require a great deal, but they do need food, water, and access to a place to relieve themselves.
Hospitals have not been designed with the need to keep dogs where they are intended to be, which means they require an able-bodied handler.
There is the matter of cleanliness — we don’t want fleas and ticks brought into the hospital setting.
It makes sense that dogs that have a proven track record (therapy dogs, human-assistance dogs,) would have greater privileges within a hospital setting than other dogs.So, yes, but…
Dogs might require a quick inspection for cleanliness, no obvious signs of pest infestation. If the dog doesn’t pass inspection, then the patient could come to an outdoor courtyard and interact with the dog there.
Dogs would require a short leash and an able-bodied handler to be with the dog at all times.
Dogs who have proper certifications and training could be allowed to stay with a patient, provided the patient is ambulatory enough to get food, water, access to an outdoor courtyard for the dog, and able to clean up its droppings from the courtyard. Leash could be optional for these dogs in the patient’s room. Should the patient no longer be able to provide these things, there must be a friend or family member who can come a minimum of twice a day to provide these things. (It can’t be hospital staff.)Ayn Rand on me: the “regulation” occurs at every level of the court system and always has, if you break, harm, or disadvantage somebody you get sued for damages.
Dr D:
Allow me to shoot some holes into that logic with a parenting lesson.
If I never give a child any limits, then the child — at less than one year of age, mind you — opens the door, crawls to the street and begins crawling down the street. (It was the sidewalk, not the street, but this happened with my twin sons. They didn’t get very far before I figured it out and ran to the rescue, but they did make it to the sidewalk and were crawling down the sidewalk towards the busy street. After that, the front security door always had the double-key deadlock engaged, with they key on a hook at my eye-level.)If we rely solely on aggrieved parties to bring it to the courts’ attention that a person or entity is doing public harm, the harm may go on for a very long time, harming the property, health, and well-being of many. Court-mandated reparations seldom adequately mitigate the original harms — often, harms are impossible to reverse. Once the court acknowledges the harm, then, still, the only thing preventing the same type of harm from occurring again, is reliance upon the psychological makeup of the perpetrator being (a) aware of the prior court case, and (b) being fearful enough of potential adverse consequences to avoid the deleterious act. Many believe that threatening adverse consequences is an excellent way to shape human behavior. While it is often successful, it also has a tendency to leave emotional wreckage in its wake, and for some humans backfires completely. (The discipline meted out by the high school vice principal of discipline against my son last year was a perfect example of this — the result was escalation of his behavior until I stepped in in a big way, pointed out that they were in violation of his IEP, and his problems behaviors were from then on referred to the two individuals at the school who had a background in behavioral health. His problem behaviors gradually subsided, and currently the first three weeks of his senior year have ambled along relatively smoothly.)
An alternative (and often complementary) strategy is to teach people “principles to live by,” — a moral code, if you will — and yet another is to codify a set of agreed rules to follow in specific situations. Both the moral code and set of rules strategy rely on humanity’s ability to think and reason, rather than on the fear response of the ancient limbic system. So, when I’m an employer, I may look to a moral code that tells me to treat employees “as I would like to be treated,” with compassion and respect, and I may look to a set of laws that tell me which taxes to pay, to purchase workmen’s comp insurance, overtime pay for work in excess of 40 hours per week, etc. Yes, there will always be unscrupulous individuals and entities who behave in antisocial ways, bending the moral code and codified rules in their favor. And there will be innovators who creatively come up with new ways to apply the old rules or modes of operation where the established rules are nonsensical. Sometimes, the unscrupulous and the innovators are the same person. Still, the idea of an unofficial moral code and a codified set of regulations is an effective way to educate people into the current accepted way of doing things, or, at least, the way that we would like a system to operate. Morality and codified rules are ways to get humans thinking about how they want their systems to function, rather than simply reacting to fear with the limbic system.
@ oroboros
Sometimes I enjoy your shared memes, sometimes I find them somewhat wonky or wacky. Today’s meme about health icons in US, Canada, Belgium, Britain- that could not be more spot on.I was waiting for my pizza to be prepared at a pizza place yesterday around 5 pm. A bright-eyed, white-haired woman joined me in the waiting area and our eyes met. She said something about how Covid was supposed to be bad again soon. “It’s all a bunch of crap,” I said, “ the Biden administration just wants us all to be scared.”
“I didn’t get vaccinated,” she confided.
“Me neither,” I replied. “My parents and spouse and I all had Covid in October 2020.”
And thus went the conversation. My pizza was ready, so I got up and retrieved it. Our eyes met just before I went out the door. “You’re not alone; you are not the only one.”
And *that* is what it will take to stop the masking, stop the nonsensical “social distancing,” stop the lockdowns. Just people standing up and ignoring it. The emperor has no clothes!
Dr D
Thus we discard our fathers, all their books and statues and “Listen to the children” like Greta (Now long an adult).I do not believe that Marx was “evil.” I do believe that he was flawed — that he was human. And, I do believe that his writings have been used to further tyrannical, evil causes. However, the ideas of many have been used to further tyrannical causes — including the contents of the Old and New Testaments. (Otherwise, the book Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend would never have been specifically directed towards Christians.).
In fact, it is in the New Testament that we are told “…and a little child shall lead them.” In the Old Testament: “Walk as children of light.” Joan of Arc was little more than a child, led armies, was killed for her convictions…and later made a Catholic saint.
Greta was a child. She feels deeply, and was raised to give honest voice to her convictions. Had she been raised in a different family, she might have been fighting against abortion every Friday. She has been used by the establishment to further their own goals. I pity her. I would not have permitted my child to be used thusly, but then, if Greta’s beliefs mirror those of her parents (which is likely,) then I can see how easily her parents could have been hoodwinked.
One of my sons is likely slightly autistic (never formally assessed.). His thinking is very black and white, and he looks to me and other trusted adults for confirmation and guidance. He is 17, so I find myself frequently endeavoring to chip away at the harsh divide in his mind between polar opposites, as I try to help him see the grays and “in betweens.”
Greta appears to be bright enough. Someday, when life throws her enough curveballs that don’t fit into her worldview, she will either learn to see the grays, or she will go somewhat mad. If she learns to see more broadly, it will be interesting to see how she acts at that point, whether fighting against those who formally upheld her, or compromising her core self, or something else.
I have found a good use for the stupid masks…the well-fitting cotton masks are very good for spending an hour in the attic. They lower the number of dust particles that I breathe in, which makes a noticeable improvement. Amazing…a dust mask is somewhat effective at preventing one from breathing dust — but all that other, tinier stuff, just forget it.
Is an atheist food bank simply a secular food bank? The food bank closest to me IS secular. It is run by a hospital. And, no, the hospital was never run by a church. I live in the Sunnyslope neighborhood of Phoenix. This community was founded by people with tuberculosis and other ailments whose doctors had recommended an arid climate. These people and their families moved to Phoenix and settled north of the canal — where there was no irrigation, no farms, less pollen, and (one would suppose) cheaper land. There were a lot of sick and impoverished people. A nurse decided to help these people. Through her efforts the “Desert Mission” was established. The Desert Mission became the John C. Lincoln hospital and the Desert Mission Food Bank. The school my children attended for kindergarten is far enough that they were bussed. The bus stop was two streets over, so I used to walk them there in the mornings. The strop was in front of an empty parcel of land — about an acre. The land was owned by the Food Bank, and was promised to be used for low income housing. A few years back, the hospital was sold. The new owner still runs the food bank, but didn’t want the parcel of land, and so sold it to a local non-profit with a covenant to develop it as low-income housing. This was actually done! Now, instead of being a place where people illegally dump or where homeless camp, it is full of neat rows of town-houses. It looks very nice, and has a playground. People are beginning to move in. People have to be low-income to live there, the prices are kept low, and they buy the residences, so that they can build equity even if they don’t have perfect credit or don’t have a large enough down payment.
Humans are humans. Many religious people are great! Many agnostics and atheists are also great! There are also nasty people who are religious, agnostic, or atheist. Just being a theist doesn’t make someone a quality person. However, it is true that because religions generally try to get parishioners to follow moral codes, and most of the moral codes associated with religions are pretty decent, that if you run across a religious person who is genuinely trying to follow their religion, they are usually a quality person. With the non-religious it may take more effort to ascertain whether someone is a quality person.
US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the statement on Thursday. He added that innovations in agricultural biotechnology to enhance yields also help ease the challenges of global food and nutrition security, climate change and food price inflation. “And these innovations increase the capacity for mega-corporations and overweening governments to exert increasingly coercive control over large populations.” There. Fixed it. That was the part that was “between the lines.”
Karl Sagan on greenhouse effect yesterday
That is my view precisely…no need to start running around screaming “the sky is falling,” but we have been pumping the atmosphere with CO2, blithely ignoring the fact that we don’t know what the effect may be. The argument that the planet has sustained life not too different from what we have now with higher levels of CO2 is a valid one, and means that we needn’t do anything rash, but to pretend that the large amounts of CO2 put into the atmosphere by humans is “A-okay” and will have no effect is wishful thinking. There has to be a middle ground — where we aren’t swayed by anyone’s propaganda and those studying climate and related sciences can do their work without strongly biased pressure one way or the other. Fossil fuels are not infinite; humans should be experimenting with alternatives so that we reduce the speed at which we consume fossil fuels and find a way to preserve the best parts from our modern way of life for our posterity. Some of the alternatives will turn out to be dead-ends. (Alternatives that require copious amounts of rare earth metals, their extraction poisoning drinking water and requiring slave labor to be economically viable are probably going to ultimately be dead-ends.)
Beams and motes and beams in eyes
Chris Hedges is spot on about Israel. He lived in and reported on the Arab world for a long time. However, he appears to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the Covid & vaccine narrative, even though he is typically skeptical of political authority. He is familiar with the world of the elites because he was a gifted student, and was given scholarships to attend prestigious schools and mingle with the scions of the wealthy and powerful.
RFK Jr is spot on about corruption in government and industry generally. He has decades of intimate knowledge and experience about corporate polluters, Big Pharma, and the cozy relationship they have with government regulators. He is extensively familiar with the problems with vaccinations. Because of his family background, he has political connections, and an understanding of government and elite levers of power that most folks do not have. Because of his family background, he believes the “moral story” around Israel — this particular area of corruption is not closely related to his life’s work.
There are no flawless heroes — just flawed humans. However, there is a big difference between Chris Hedges, RFK Jr, and — although I never thought that I would say this — Donald Trump, who, although flawed, are trying to chart a course in line with valid moral principles, and with Bidens’R’Us, the deep state blob, and WEFfers cabal who are basing their charted course on characteristics lifted from the “Cluster B Personality Disorders” section of the DSM.
~~~~
In other realms of existence…
Over the past 4 days my 15 year old daughter has told me in detail, and given me a couple of her diary entries, about her father’s expressions of suicidal ideation, incipient sexual abuse, obvious verbal abuse of her brother, and revealed that she has been flirting with suicide for years as a means to escape her father’s household. In an hour I will be consulting with my attorney and I expect to be filing legal papers to reopen the custody case a few hours after that.I always suspected/expected that this was going on, but I didn’t have any proof, only a mother’s hunch…and I knew that my intuition wouldn’t hold water in court. Now it is time to act.
Wish me luck.
Interesting stuff:
Pfizer on successful trajectory to reduce world population in half, a part of its 2019 5 year plan. Can’t quite believe it, but then words line up with the mouth.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: “It’s really something of a dream that we had together w/ my medicine team — we set up the goals for the next 5yrs & one of them was by 2023 we will reduce the number of people in the world by 50%”
Klaus Schwab: “So it’s really a purpose driven company” pic.twitter.com/Aept7qzvMr
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 13, 2023
New song trending: rich men north of Richmond
I can’t listen to Oliver Anthony's “Rich Men North of Richmond” without getting chills.
It's raw, it's true, & it's touching the hearts of men & women across this great nation.
Thank you, @AintGottaDollar for writing the anthem of this moment in American history. pic.twitter.com/D7VTtMVv97
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) August 12, 2023
Bear rejects Big Mac
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1690818617472933889?s=20I’m scratching my head trying to figure out the significance of Kunstler’s leading quote to a fictional character from the early 2000s remake of Battlestar Galactica. I’m fairly certain the fictional character never expressed that quote…as there was no “West” in the show to reference, that I can recall. Is there someone on Substack who has adopted the “Gaius Baltar” moniker? He is a problematic, flawed character at best. A kind of antihero.
JB-hb
Regarding music
It isn’t just that there are fewer jobs and opportunities for performing musicians.
Music has become something consumed rather than something created.
I played a few times as a substitute for the usual duo for happy hour at a room adjacent to the tiny bar at the local retirement community. They especially like songs that they can sing along with. Most of the songs are copyrighted, popular songs from the 1950s and forward. I realized as they hummed or sang along that these songs are what people know — they essentially are the “folk music” of the 20th century — but they are owned by corporations instead of being the birthright of the people. And all most folks can do with them is sing along, because the creation of music has been outsourced to a small-ish number of people.Oxymoron – single
Kudos! I would love a listen when it is ready. 🙂 I finished a song last week myself…I’m not yet ready to share it here…I’m still growing accustomed to the chord progressions and don’t play them flawlessly yet, lol. It’s about how fear is used to control us….Piers Corbyn defies store policy, purchasing strawberries with coin, rather than electronic means.
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1686061060753702926?s=20
Comment retry…..
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@VP
Yesterday, regarding undocumented immigrants, everything I related was not from an article where a writer spoke with others, it was from my first-hand experience with people that I have known personally over the course of many, many years. Secondhand accounts, no matter the source, no matter how vitriolic, cannot blot out my lived experience.Yes, there are criminals who happen to be immigrants. And there are criminals who are citizens. Those who commit violent crimes and who are vandalizing and thieving ought to be turned over to the legal apparatus.
I am sure that there are undocumented criminals in Phoenix. But I have never gotten to know one. I have had people here in my life that I have known pretty well that along the way I figured out probably didn’t have their immigration status in proper order. Every one was a solid person, contributing well to their family and the overall economy. Now, it may be that I don’t bother taking the time to get to know people who are criminals. However, for the folks that I have known that I am fairly sure are undocumented, to force them to leave would be to rip them away from the bosoms of citizens who are family and friends whom they benefit and support.
In the Bible, doesn’t it talk of sifting the chaff from the wheat? I see the logic in ejecting the undocumented who are chaff, but there is no sense in ejecting the undocumented who are the wheat.
And….here we go again…
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I do not think that my daughter’s automatic distrust of authority figures is a great boon to her. Any automatic trust/distrust is problematic — it causes people to make rash decisions that can have far-reaching effects. It is more important to bring online the rational, thinking mind to analyze the situation — incorporating gut-feelings and intuition into the process.
My daughter’s automatic distrust of authority figures has contributed to her history of eating disorder, self-harm, and depression. In 8th grade she did not get along with a teacher and resorted to self-harm to deal with the emotions — I had to contact the school to get her changed to a different class once I realized what was going on. In 9th grade she again had an authoritarian teacher, and struggled, but followed the “proper” steps at my urging, going to her counselor and following the proscribed instructions. When she was too nervous to take the final step of speaking with the vice principal, I stepped in and contacted the vice principal and the change happened. Now, her 10th grade schedule is incorrect, and — all on her own, with no input from me (she was at her dad’s) — she penned a cogent email to her counselor explaining the errors, the reasons why they are errors, and explaining why she needs a different elective in order to avoid panic attacks. I have modeled to her that automatic distrust is often self-sabotaging, and it is frequently more useful to grant partial trust, test whether or not the trust is warranted, granting a sliver or two more trust when authority figures “pass the test.” Don’t trust authority figures beyond what is useful, or beyond what has been tested, keep testing them, be wary about how much trust you grant, and be ready to rescind your trust as needed. Full trust is something rare, and should only be granted to individuals who have proven themselves worthy of such trust over a long period of time.
Try 2….
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@ Alexander Carpenter
@ Formerly T-BearI’ve run across these issues periodically on TAE. I usually access TAE from Firefox on an iPad. Some tips:
– if your comment didn’t take, but you are still logged into the site, immediately use the browser back button. Often, your comment is still in the browser cache, and you can copy it out of the comment box and try again with a fresh reload of the site.
– if your comment didn’t take, and now you find yourself logged out, open a new tab, log in, go back to the original tab and use the back button — occasionally you can return to what you wrote that way.
– Realize that TAE has some comment SPAM filters in place. When you comment and the site claims the comment took, but it doesn’t display, that means that your comment was likely stored successfully in the website database, but isn’t displaying due to a glitch. You can paste the comment in and try again, but you will need to preface it with some text, characters, carriage returns, etc., to make the first part different that the disappeared comment. The comment SPAM filter appears to only look at the first part of a comment when determining whether or not it is SPAM.
– to avoid using the back button to revive a comment, you can (a) write the comment in a different program on your device and copy it into the comment box, or (b) simply copy (i.e, to the device clipboard) the comment before posting so that you can paste it back out if you have fallen prey to the comment gremlin.(Ah…the world of workarounds with technical devices….)
Take 3 on this comment…..
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Um, ok, MacGregor suggesting telling “all illegals” to just leave and register for re-try in the way out illustrates to me that he doesn’t have a clear grasp of the problem. I agree that the border needs to be “closed” in some sense — but not completely, there are people who live on one side and go to work and school on the other. And many “illegals” have been here for 10, 20, 40 years. Does anyone really expect a 70+ year old Mexican granny who has been here 30+ years and who spends her day tending her American citizen great-grandchildren to leave under an order like that? Or the man who has been here 10 years, married to a woman who is either a citizen or legal resident, and has fed and clothed her two daughters since they were small, even though they are not his own? Or the man who fled with his wife and son nearly 20 years ago because he accidentally pissed off a Mexican cartel boss and now has teen children who are American citizens? Or the son in the former paragraph, a “dreamer” with no recollection of Mexico, brought as a young child, who had a public education in the US and is attending university, close to graduating. THIS is why not enforcing immigration laws is such a mess! Because immigrants tend to weave themselves into the fabric of our communities, and becoming our neighbors and friends and business associates. At this point, ordering them all to leave, if the directive were followed, would wrench families and communities apart. Any such directive is doomed to failure because families and communities will resist being torn apart.
I still have this issue of parents not having access to teen’s medical portals rolling around in my head.
• This is not being driven by state law. This is state law:
Appendix B: Arizona Revised Statute 26-2272
36-2272. Consent of parent required for mental health screening or treatment of minors; exception; violation; classification;
definition
A. Except as otherwise provided by law or a court order, no person, corporation, association, organization or state-supported
institution, or any individual employed by any of these entities, may procure, solicit to perform, arrange for the performance
of or perform mental health screening in a nonclinical setting or mental health treatment on a minor without first obtaining the
written or oral consent of a parent or a legal custodian of the minor child. If the parental consent is given through telemedicine,
the health professional must verify the parent’s identity at the site where the consent is given.
B. This section does not apply when an emergency exists that requires a person to perform mental health screening or
provide mental health treatment to prevent serious injury to or save the life of a minor child.
C. A person who violates this section is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor.
D. For the purposes of this section, “parent” means the parent or legal guardian of a minor child.
• The pamphlet is put out by the Arizona Medical Association. After the covid issues, we know that these medical associations all appear to be in the pocket of some sort of superior force of will, some sort of totalitarian-flavored dystopic mythos.
• The pamphlet was put out in 2018 – before the gender hysteria reached its current heights, suggesting that this has been in the works for quite some time.Here’s the thing:
Teens, although often very competent in some areas of life (with a great deal of individual variation), are not typically sufficiently competent in our complex societies to avoid being hoodwinked and manipulated by those who wish to do so. (For that matter, they are not magically able to do this well at age 18, however, that is the legal age of adulthood.) Parents are by virtue of the law and by tradition obligated to look out for the welfare and well-being of their children, including teens up to age 18. While there are some parents who don’t do this well, and others who neglect this duty or violate it, abusing their children, there is no natural surrogate for this responsibility. Also, in the case of children whose parents are neglectful or abusive, they have already had one (or two) of the natural authoritative figures in their lives violate their duty, which means that such children often fixate on authority figures either too easily or with great reluctance. Children that fixate on authority figures too easily are easily manipulated; children who respect authorities with great reluctance often avoid sources where otherwise they might have obtained aid. Teens whose parents are problematic may seek out other trustworthy adults – but doing so must be on the teen’s own terms, who is trustes cannot be mandated by law nor by the Arizona Medical Association.In the case of my own daughter, her father destroyed her trust in authorities at a very young age, and once the court mandated that the kids spend more than six hours a week with their father, he denigrated me in front of the children with his expanded access, causing her to sabotage her relationship with me as well. I have regained her trust, but it took years before she and I rebuilt that trust relationship. The idea that my daughter – or any child who has responded to a mis-behaving parent as she has – would suddenly trust some sort of medical or behavioral health professional proffering “confidential” services is ridiculous. It’s even more ridiculous in light of Arizona law that says that a teen cannot receive “confidential” care without parental consent! And Arizona law says that parents can pull the records for such care.
Teens are open to manipulation, due to their lack of maturity. Parents are a bulwark to block and prevent others from manipulating their teens. Removing parents from the equation opens up all teens to manipulation by other adults and other entities and social forces.
Hm. My daughter will be getting two more annual exams before she is 18. My sons will be getting one each. The next time I go to one of these exams I’m going to bring a copy of the relevant Arizona statute and decline the confidential interview. (The provider was asking about my teen’s sexual orientation for goodness sakes!) It is my legal right to do so and there is no reason to subject my teens to this intrusive interview. (And, okay, I’m going to enjoy declining it—very politely.)
Oroboros yesterday:
“Received this from a source in Washington. This pediatric clinic revokes parents’ access to their kid’s medical records when the kid turns 13, and says kids can make their own medical decisions.”
Yes, this has been going on for quite some time — at least 5 years or more. I lost access to my son’s portal with the children’s hospital when he was 13. He has behavioral problems and despite his raw intelligence, which is solid, he is immature in many other areas. At age 13 I was of the opinion that it not beneficial for him to understand that he needed to grant his parent access to his online medical records. It would not have helped his overall demeanor. Therefore, we have not used the portal since then.When the boys were 13, the medical items that teens could restrict parents from knowing about were minimal. However, it appears that this is expanding: https://az.childrenshealthdefense.org/healthcare/child-health/parental-access-to-medical-records-for-children-12-and-older/
Last month at the annual exam for my 15 year old daughter, the provider had me leave for a few minutes so that she could talk to my daughter alone. This bothered me….but I was in the hall and the insulation wasn’t acoustically sound—With little effort I could follow the conversation. And, because my daughter is who she is, later in the car my daughter complained about the confidential bit, reporting to me about the questions, and explained that she didn’t like the provider at all—the provider had failed to earn my daughter’s trust and therefore my daughter would tell her nothing. Unsurprising…the provider tried early in the visit to guilt my daughter for not being vigilant enough in her tooth care, and from that moment on the provider had burned all bridges with my daughter, lol. So they want to treat teens as adults when it comes to confidentiality, but at the same time treating them as little children when it comes to dental care — quixotic.
I’d switch providers for that and other issues…but that would involve agreement with my ex, and these annoyances do not negatively affect the children and aren’t worth the effort of wrangling with their father.
Also…these changes seem to be on unsteady legal ground. Although teens have to grant electronic portal access to parents, legally parents have access to medical records with the same very few exceptions…which is why my daughter cannot obtain psychotherapy, as her father would have to agree to it and would have access to the records. (Teens Psychotherapy records are not able to be shielded from parents in AZ.)
In Arizona, a minor is not considered the client; the parent(s) is/ are. -https://eastvalleytraumacounseling.com/treating-adolescents/treating-a-minor-in-arizona/
I have been aware for some time that the local retirement community has been struggling financially since Covid. I know part of the problem is that in addition to independent living they also have an assisted living unit, a memory care unit, and a care center for residents who temporarily require medical assistance while recovering from some malady. These last three units receive Medicare funding, and as such all employees of the community were mandated to take the jab. I noticed that at about the same time several long time employees left, and the retirement community has struggled to fill all of these positions. Of course, the inflation is contributing, and most residents are on fixed incomes. The community began outsourcing some services that previously were in-house. Last week an additional problem was acutely brought to my attention: they cannot seem to find enough new residents to fill the empty spaces or to fund pending construction. I suspect that deaths are also up, contributing to vacancies, but I have neither data nor anecdote to corroborate this. I wonder if the other retirement communities in the greater metro area are experiencing similar problems…?
Hunh. Same posting issue. Here goes another attempt, maybe this time it works?
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Another thought on climate change:
When big business was ignoring environmental issues and government was so cosy with business that it, too, was, for the most part, ignoring environmental issues, there was a certain logic to being involved with environmental activist activities to “wake up” the populace, the government, business to the need to address our wastes.
However, the Cabal/Deep State/WEFfers decided that in order to enact their totalitarian aims, they needed to have “moral warriors” in order to hypnotize the populace with fear and moral rectitude. (‘Cause totalitarianism only works when you can frame it in moral terms.). So, they chose a variety of issues, all of which were calculated to resonate strongly with Millennials and later generations. Hence, we have “Woke folk” taking a “moral” stand on climate change, LGBT(etc.), race, and words-that-make-you-feel-badly. The older generation folks who are in league with the deep state are the pied pipers in this routine, and so they add to the “moral” mixture other issues that support their agenda, such as “trust science,” masks and vaccines for grandma, and censorship of “hate.”
It seems that regular, run-of-the-mill environmentalism has been totally lost in the shuffle — human rights also.
