Leslie Fish's Blog, page 9

On Baby-Scr*wing

The latest news in the ongoing saga of Celebrity-Baby-Sex-Trafficker Epstein is:  "men's rights activist" Roy Hollander, chief suspect in the shooting of the son and husband of Judge Esther Salas, who was overseeing a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank, which was accused of not sufficiently vetting Epstein before accepting his money, has apparently killed himself.  I'm not sure how many suspicious deaths -- including his own -- are now linked to the infamous pimp.  The only question is just who is covering up all of his possible tracks and contacts.  Guesses have ranged from the Clintons to the British Royals.

Personally, I think it's the Mafia.  More than a century ago the classic Italian/American Mafia decided to quietly declare war on child-molesters, professional or private, and they've kept up with it ever since.  Subsequent organized-crime gangs may go in for child-sex trafficking, but the Mafia silently wars with them, too.  It's also well known that prisons are not safe for molesters, regardless of which gang rules in any particular prison.  This goes to show that, in America at least, whether you're rich and powerful or bottom of the heap, if you're a baby-scr*wer you're not welcome and not safe. 

One reason for this is that psychiatrists report having a dismal record at curing pedophiles.  It's what they call a "highly resistant psychopathy", and all they can recommend is to keep the pedophiles locked up for life.  The public seems to have quietly added another alternative: shoot them. 

In fact, I know of exactly two pedophiles -- both men, as the great majority of them seem to be -- who actually cured themselves of the compulsion.  Both of them managed to re-focus their sexual tastes into, if you please, BDSM -- starting as Bottoms, and eventually working their way up to Tops.  Both of them had been molested as children themselves, as a lot of pedophiles seem to be, and in both cases their original molesters mysteriously met with violent ends -- which may or may not have assisted in the cures.  Both of them had concluded that their original fixation on children came from frustrated misery over being victimized as children themselves.  This is an interesting contrast to those prisoners, most of whom were likewise molested and otherwise abused as children, who turn their fury onto any molesters they catch.  It's hard to say which reaction is healthier, for society or the individual.

One factor that I've never been able to track down is the age of the victims at the first molestation.  It would make sense that a very young victim would feel drowned in helplessness and would turn his misery back on himself or other children of the same age, while an older one -- say post-pubescent -- would have some idea of just whom to blame and how to get revenge.  In any case, the outcome of baby-scr*wing is always bad. 

This leads me to wonder about the general character of societies that allow, let alone encourage, baby-scr*wing.  Whether male or female, the victims will nurture a slow-roasting misery and rage that can express itself in a lot of dangerous ways throughout life.  Perhaps the rulers of those societies hope to profit from that rage, perhaps by using it to fuel armies of blindly vicious cannon-fodder, or perhaps by terrorizing their subjects into hopeless obedience.  Perhaps the tactic even works, for a time, but sooner or later it will turn on the victimizers -- usually in the form of treachery.  Baby-scr*wing societies -- I'll name no names -- are notorious for lack of internal cohesion, for their members turning on each other at the slightest excuse, for a lack of internal trust and loyalty, not to mention ready betrayal of outsiders.  In any case, a society -- as small as a family or as large as a nation -- which turns a blind or even approving eye on child-molesting cannot be trusted.

Perhaps it was historical experience in dealing with societies like these that have made Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, really hate baby-scr*wers.  It's no surprise that Epstein and his connections have been dying at a fast clip.  It will be interesting to see who goes down next. 


--Leslie <;)))><                   


 

Misinformation on the Bounty

At present the mainstream media are occupied with three supposed scandals.  In order of importance (that is, time spent on them), they are: 1) Putin paid Taliban troops a bounty to kill American soldiers, and Trump knew about it and is still making nicey-face at Putin;  2) The spread of the Covid-19 virus  "rages unchecked";  3) The pitiful state of those "refugee" children, separated from their "parents" at the border, is unchanged.  And of course it's all Trump's fault. 

Since that third item is more than a year old, one has to wonder why the newsies are bringing it up now.  The second item is serious, but really not deserving of the panic which the media seem determined to fan; as the number of tests increases, so does the number of discovered cases -- but the fatality-rate for Covid-19 cases is dropping steadily.  It's the first item that's getting the lion's share of the media's attention, but with the least amount of verification.

The Pentagon and the US State Department -- and of course the Foreign Offices of a lot of other countries -- have known for centuries that there's nothing easier than to get Arabs to fight other Arabs.  Quite often you don't even have to pay them;  they'll do it for free.  However, if you want to get Arabs to fight specific groups of other Arabs, it's best to pay them;  otherwise they'll go off the rails and attack anyone in sight. 

Certainly different groups of Arabs will insist that no, no, they're not Arabs;  they're Afghans, or Persians, or Turks, or Babylonians, or whatever, and they're totally different -- but in fact they all share and are defined by a common culture, which has plagued the world for nearly 4000 years.  One constant feature of that culture -- besides its rampant sexism, racism, class and religious bigotry -- is its treasured hate.  Arabs love their hate, and they love to exercise it on anyone they can reach, including each other.  One old Arab saying goes: "Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my brother and my cousin against the tribe, me and my brother and my cousin and my tribe against the world."  This, of course, does not endear them to the rest of the world.  In previous ages the rest of the world endured the Arabs or fought them as best it could, but in the modern age the more powerful countries have found Arabs to be useful as a weapon against each other.   

Now Russia and China have no love for each other, but one thing they can agree on is that they both hate Arabs even more;  therefore it makes perfect sense that Russia would pay Taliban Arabs to go kill ISIS Arabs.  China is, as always, playing its hand very close to its vest, so the State Dept. isn't sure just which Arabs China is paying, and to kill whom. 

The problem with paying Arabs to kill other Arabs is that, unlike Boss Tweed's definition of an honest politician, they don't stay bought.  Russia may be handing out chunks of money to various Taliban tribes, but without careful micro-management those Taliban Arabs will take the money and pay their cronies to go kill other targets.  This, according to what the Pentagon has learned, is pretty much what happened in Afghanistan;  the Russians paid some Taliban warlord, who then offered much of the money to pay other Arabs to go after his own pet target, which is American troops.  There is no evidence whatever that this is what the Russian government intended.  In fact, there's no proof so far that any Arabs actually took up the warlord on his offer, since American troops are noticeably harder to kill than other Arabs.. 

As to the question of whether Trump knew about this, the Pentagon claims that no, he wasn't briefed on this particular situation.  Of course he'd been told, probably many months ago, that the Russians were paying the Taliban to go kill ISIS, so that itself was old news and not worth repeating in the President's daily briefing.  Likewise, until there was good evidence that some Arabs really had taken the bounty and killed American troops, they wouldn't bother telling Trump about the warlord offering the bounty at all.  It's still just an unconfirmed rumor, as even The New York Times admitted.

As for Trump making nicey-face at Putin, remember that Trump shovels on flattery with a trowel, but there's no evidence that he ever means anything by it.  You can almost never rely on what Trump says, but only what he does   What he's actually done with Russia is to keep the trade-sanctions going, and Russia is suffering serious economic problems because of them.  Russia's economy can be politely described as a train-wreck, with no end in sight.  If Trump were to put much more of an economic squeeze on Russia, there would be Russians starving in the streets, which is not a good idea.   

This, plus the nasty press this pay-for-slay story has gotten, should be enough to make the Russians get serious about micro-managing those Taliban warlords that they've been paying off -- either that, or quit paying the Arabs completely, and given Russia's longstanding cultural paranoia, it's  unlikely they'll stop trying to manipulate the Arabs. What's more likely is that the particular warlord who caused the embarrassment  will mysteriously vanish and never be heard of again.

Meanwhile the story is useful for the media to lambaste Trump with, just like the other two "scandals", and a good red herring to divert the public from the AntifaBLM riots, which have become something of an embarrassment for the Socialist Democrats.  In fact, some clever Republicans -- which is not necessarily an oxymoron -- have put together a wonderfully effective campaign ad which shows clips of AntifaBLM thugs going smash-loot-burn while a simulated 911-emergency-line voice sweetly announces that the police are not available now -- "your wait time is approximately five days" -- and lettering at the bottom of the screen labels this as "Biden's America".  As propaganda goes, this is a real coup, and it's no coincidence that the media began pushing its Trump-to-Putin-to-Taliban-killing-our-soldiers story shortly after this ad began playing all over the major TV channels.  It all boils down to a simple case of dueling propaganda pieces.

A parallel case is playing out here in Arizona, over the Senatorial race between McSally (R) and Kelly (D).  Both candidates were previously in the Air Force, so both the ads show clips of flying fighter-planes.  The joke is that the planes are shown flying from opposite directions,and with the ads run back-to-back on the local channels, it looks as if they were coming at each other for an aerial dogfight.  We've taken to calling these the "dogfight ads", and together they make a lovely example of dueling propaganda.  As such, they ought to be shown in Debate, Logic, Speech and Journalism classes.           

It's my hope that in this video age -- and after being regularly bombarded with advertising -- the voters will experience enough propaganda in daily life to recognize it when they see it. 

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(   





















                                                                                                   

Wretched Excess: Thug Cops, BLM, and Some Realistic Solutions

                                             



THEY set the slave free, striking off his chains...
Then he was as much of a slave as ever.
 
He was still chained to servility,
He was still manacled to indolence and sloth,
He was still bound by fear and superstition,
By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery...
His slavery was not in the chains,
But in himself....
 
They can only set free men free...
And there is no need of that:
Free men set themselves free.


                                                             --Untermeyer

The Sheep from the Goats from the Dragons

It hasn't been so many years since I went marching in the streets, along with several thousand close friends, protesting for civil rights, peace, women's liberation, Gay rights, the ecosystem, the radical labor movement, and a few other similar causes.  I've marched on more demonstrations than I can count, most of them large, a few of them enormous.  I've seen how they were organized, how well they served their purpose, what enemies they had and how we dealt with them.  In time, I learned to recognize the techniques.

Early on, we learned that the cops -- however much they might hate us -- weren't the main enemy.  They might charge into us  without warning, swinging their clubs with fierce abandon, but there was a simple defense against that -- one that I wish the continuing Black civil rights organizations would teach their followers everywhere: go limp, shut up, and play dead.  This worked, both because it left the cops with no legal excuse -- in front of cameras, yet -- to keep on beating us, and also because "dead" prey is no fun to play with.  A bit of body-armor took care of the rest.  This is why, as I've said elsewhere, as much as the cops truly hated us, very few peace-et-al marchers were actually killed by them.

Far more dangerous were the opportunistic thugs, who hid among our ranks until and unless we came past cars and buildings with smashable windows and appealing loot inside -- including easy victims to attack for fun and profit.  We soon learned to identify these, partly by the way they dressed (scruffy, with only a few slogan-buttons or a single slogan-shirt, and few or no picket-signs) but by the way they acted.  The serious protesters walked with a steady economy of movement, and even when chanting we paced our breathing, because we expected to march a long way -- and we kept our eyes on the streets ahead of us, watching for police or other obstructions.  The thugs couldn't seem to chant the slogans without throwing in assorted obscenities and threats, and they couldn't seem to march more than a few paces without darting off to the sides to check out the cars and buildings as we moved past.  These were dangerous because they would not only stain our reputations, at a time when we were trying to win public sympathy, but because they'd also draw the cops down on us.

We dealt with them by tightening our borders, often by joining hands, so that the thugs had difficulty getting out of the body of the demonstration and even more difficulty getting back in.  Thugs separated from the mass were very visible to the cops, who also seemed to recognize thugs by the way they behaved and would react accordingly.  Interestingly enough, the thugs never seemed to pick up on the protesters' tactic of go-limp-shut-up-play-dead, but would always yell and fight -- with the expected consequences.  Good riddance.

More dangerous still were the False-Flag provocateurs.  These were harder to spot, at first, because they knew the right way to dress, chant, and move -- but they'd show their true colors as the demonstrations proceeded.  By subtle degrees they'd work their way to the center-front of the crowd and move with a little more tension, swing their arms a little more fiercely, chant a little louder, and then -- by starting up when the rest of us had finished chanting a slogan -- begin leading the chants, adding slightly more aggressive words, a little louder and faster than before.  We noticed that they'd also carry things with them -- like bottles -- that could be easily thrown.  If left unchecked they'd effectively herd the other marchers into the police lines, and then throw rocks and bottles and curses until the cops attacked.  This, of course, would turn the march into a jolly brawl -- in front of the cameras -- that got our people injured and discredited the whole demonstration.

We learned to deal with this by exposing them.  Whenever we spotted someone exhibiting the known characteristics, we'd turn and point to them while yelling: "Imposter!  Imposter!"  This drew them to the attention of both the cops and the cameras, which spoiled not only their plans for the demonstration but their anonymity.  Once their faces and names (and intentions) were known to the cops and the media, their usefulness was ended;  they had no choices except to duck out of sight, get new identities and new looks, and try again in some other state.  Eventually we found some of them, years later, working for various police forces or other government offices -- where they'd come from in the first place.  I suspect that a few of them went on to private practice.

So I recognize what I've been seeing on the news for the past week.  There are the serious protesters, whose purpose is both to win sympathy for their cause and show the numbers of their sympathizers;  they're readily identifiable by their steady marching pace and their hands full of picket-signs.  Then there are the opportunistic thugs, carrying maybe one badly-printed sign for every ten of them, but with lumpy pockets.  Finally there are the provocateurs, who often show up hours before the demonstration to plant bags of rocks, bottles, explosives and more at strategic points along the line of march or the targeted streets nearby.  Everybody has seen their antics by now.

The honest protesters can certainly tell who's who, and have begun to complain, loudly -- especially since the thugs don't just attack police cars or police stations, but go after storefronts great and small, with a nice disregard for who owns those businesses.  A lot of Black shopkeepers who have been looted and burned out by the protest-parasite thugs are speaking out, noisily.  (https://independentminute.com/2020/06/08/black-business-owner-loses-it-after-criminal-looters-destroy-his-business-during-riot-video/?utm_source=Mailer-TIA&utm_medium=email&utm_content=subscriber_id:2492264&utm_campaign=6-9%20IDM)  Still more small business owners, of all colors, have armed themselves and formed local mini-militias to defend their shops and neighborhoods. (https://breakingnewsalerts.com/business-owners-arming-themselves-against-civil-unrest/)

What makes these protest marches different from their earlier counterparts is the sheer number and organization of the provocateurs.  They've learned how, when, and where to call up large gangs of thugs at an hour's notice, which is a remarkable feat even in these days of cell-phones and the Internet.  This kind of organization and planing didn't spring up overnight;  it's been years in the making.  Now who could -- or would -- have done that?

The most obvious suspect is the infamous Antifa, which has performed similar antics in public for years, thus earning itself a federal designation as a domestic terrorist group.  Antifa members are primarily White middle-class and college age, if not actually college students themselves, and they've shown remarkable cleverness in manipulating the media, intimidating and extorting local governments and school administrations.  This skill could also explain the sudden appearance of the so-called "Boogaloo Movement", whose website purports to be politically right-wing.  Given its members' actions during the current riots, it's very possible that they're actually False Flag actors, trying to shift blame for Black rioters onto supposed White right-wingers.  We've seen that done before.     

But it's swiftly growing apparent that Antifa isn't the only major actor in this campaign.  Black Lives Matter, formed during the Ferguson riots of a few years ago, started out at least trying to look like a respectable civil rights organization -- and certainly sold that image to the media.  Very soon, however, the opportunities for extortion -- "Give us what we want or we'll throw riots in your city" -- corrupted the organization into the Black working-class version of Antifa.  By the time of the Charlottesville protests the two were working hand-in-glove, often riding to the same demonstrations on the same chartered busses.

Most recently, the thugs have been showing up wearing BLM-labeled shirts for their looting-parties, and even when attacking police.  In St. Louis, a brazenly BLM looter has been arrested for murdering a Black retired police captain who was helping a neighbor defend his store.  Other cities report BLM rioters attacking Black police and even civilians who stood between them and the loot, thus proving that it isn't Black lives that matter to them, any more than Antifa is really anti-Fascist.  The excuse for their indiscriminate smashing/looting/burning, according to thugs willing to speak to actual reporters, is that "It's all slavery money.  We're just getting our own back." -- a slogan first invented by BLM pundits.  If Antifa has earned legal standing as a domestic terrorist organization, then BLM deserves the label too.

But this only moves the question back another step.  The well-developed strategy and tactics of BLM and Antifa have had considerable backing from somewhere, and not just money from intimidated liberals.  Usual suspects include the Socialist Democrats, who have been busy bailing out jailed looters, and there are the usual accusations against George Soros and his numerous organizations, but there's no solid proof.  The chief question is motivation.  What would Soros or the Democrats have to gain by all this disruption, aside from possibly making Trump look bad? 

There's a hint from Australia, of all places, where a major Muslim preacher brags that the riots provide an "opportunity" for Islam to take over as the major political power in the world.  (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8385977/Hizb-ut-Tahrir-leader-Ismail-al-Wahwah-says-riots-cause-downfall-Islam-over.html)  This certainly is a believable motive, and the various Jihadist organizations and governments certainly have the money -- and the patience -- to have created Antifa/BLM and set up this whole campaign.  We know that the Jihadists have been trying to recruit American Blacks at least since the 1950s, when the self-named Elijah Muhammed invented the Black Muslim movement.  Certainly the Jihadists have had plenty of time to analyze and exploit the social psychology of Black Americans.

The question is how they learned to understand and manipulate so well the social psychology of White American liberals.  That implies longer and more intimate knowledge of the American psyche than the Jihadists have ever allowed themselves to learn.  Who else in the world would have that?

I'm remembering that at the height of the Vietnam war the furthest-out of the leftists began pushing and peddling Chairman Mao's famous Little Red Book, and I wondered about that.  I mean, there was no great ethnic or political group which had any love or loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, and the Vietnamese themselves wanted nothing to do with China, so where did this push come from?

The only logical answer is that the Chinese government itself  thought that this was an opportunity to infiltrate and manipulate the US through its younger and better-educated class, who already had a history of strong leftist sympathies.  It didn't work then, as note John Lennon's famous line: "If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."  Nonetheless, the Chinese govt. is nothing if not patient, and it has maintained its network in the US ever since.  The war's end and Nixon's trade offers gave China an opportunity to play economic warfare on a previously unheard of scale, and of course there was always the liberal/college-age group to exploit.

Certainly China would profit from disrupting the US by any means;  ever since the Ming dynasty China has been devoted to conquering the world by any means available, and its biggest obstacle for the last 30 years has been the US.  The only problem with using huge excited crowds to disrupt the US economy and legal system has been the difficulty with recruiting the Black community especially, and "People of Color" in general.  Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other Asians have no great sympathy for China.  Even Chinese-Americans have no great sympathy for China.  The solution to the problem would be to use a cat's-paw, an intermediary who already has a sizable following among ill-educated Blacks and worse-educated White liberals -- someone like the Jihadists.  Little though China loves Muslims, as viz its treatment of the harmless Uighurs, the Jihadists would still be useful.  It would also further China's interests to get a lot of people out into the streets, packed close together, shouting slogans, breathing in each others' faces, while the Corona virus is still flying about unchecked.

Whatever the US intelligence agencies know, and have not made public, it's clear that the most likely culprit behind the carefully sculpted "civil unrest" in the US is the government and the Communist Party of China.

Just what to do about it is another story.

--Leslie <;)))><           




             

The Floyd Case: Double-Barreled Stupidity

Not exactly a case of Deja-Vu-All-Over-Again, the killing of George Floyd and the resultant riots do have a certain resemblance to the Ferguson riots of a couple years ago.  The common factor in both these cases is thundering stupidity on both sides.

In the current case, an exceedingly stupid Minneapolis cop went after an unarmed drunk, got him on the ground, and then kneeled on his neck -- while Floyd kept yelling "I can't breathe!" -- for a good eight minutes until the man finally died, while three other cops only looked on.  This is not an approved police technique, any more than the choke-hold (which has likewise killed a few obstreperous suspects).  Now what did the cop think was going to happen if he kneeled on a man's neck for nearly ten minutes?  Likewise, what did those earlier cops think would happen if they choked people's necks, with their arms or their batons?  Stupidity in action!

To be fair, if somebody he's trying to "subdue" keeps struggling and yelling for more than five minutes, the cop is going to wonder: "If you can't breathe, where are you getting the wind to struggle and yell?"  Likewise, stupidity in action.  Compounded stupidity like this does tend to have fatal results.

Now a bit of sense on either side could easily have prevented the tragedy (not to mention several others before). 

On the victim's side, if he'd just been willing to adopt a technique invented by White folks, a good half-century before, he would have simply gone limp -- kept quiet and played dead, just like the war protesters of the '60s whenever they were knocked down by cops.  Despite the obvious political hatred, it was very rare for cops to kill anti-war protesters, and it wasn't just because most of them were White.  I don't know what it is about contemporary Black culture which encourages youngsters and even grown men to fight and curse and yell at the cops, but it doesn't do them or their community any good.  If anything, this is a fine example of how Black Pride is self-destructive on a wide scale. Stupid!

On the cops' side, the simple prevention -- which could have been started decades ago -- is to get serious about using stunners.  Nowadays, these include hand-stunners (often misnamed "stun-guns") for close range, stun-batons for middle range, and Tasers for long range.  Police departments could arm their troops with two stun-batons, three or more hand-stunners, and four or more Tasers apiece -- and train them with those stunner so intensively that the reaching for a stunner, instead of a club or gun, becomes second nature/conditioned reflex/default position.  One zap from a stunner would have put Floyd out like a light, and he could have wakened -- sore but alive -- in the back of a police car.  Problem solved.  Why has no major police department done this?  Stupid!

Note that stunner-armed cops could also deal more efficiently with self-righteous rioters.  Supply the cops with armor, riot-helmets, and riot-shields, and let them go ahead and wade into the crowds zapping everyone in front of them.  Once the rioters are either asleep or fled, the cops can then cuff the prone bodies, stack them in the paddy-wagons, and cart them off to the holding cells with no loss of life and minimal property damage.

So now we come to the usual reaction to stupid crimes like this;  the usual protest marches that then turn into merry smash-and-burn riots.  At least this time there's evidence that the involved sides are beginning to wise up.

The Ferguson riots followed a regular pattern;  community leaders would organize protest marches that made their way through the streets to significant sites -- usually the local police station or city hall -- where they'd give speeches, circulate petitions, and otherwise demand the usual Redress of Grievances.  These would proceed peaceably -- until the sun went down.  Then the thugs and provocateurs would come out, smashing windows, looting and burning stores, with a nice disregard for whether those buildings were Black or White owned.  Then the police would come out, tossing around tear-gas and smoke grenades, and bopping heads with clubs. Copycat protests and riots sprang up in several cities.  This kept up for several days running, despite the indignant complaints of the protest organizers, and they accomplished nothing except a lot of property damage and arrests.

This time around, the Black organizers of the real protests have noticed the looter/provocateur presence and complained about it.  They've also noticed that a lot of the thugs, usually wearing black head-wraps like Al-Qaida Arabs, aren't Black at all.  Note https://www.thedailybeast.com/black-organizers-enraged-by-white-agitators-here-to-fck-shit-up-in-george-floyd-protests?ref=scroll.  So far, the organizers have done nothing more to these interlopers than to take pictures and yell at them, which is usually enough to drive them off.  We'll have to wait and see if they proceed to other tactics. 

Likewise, the local police in the 30 or so protest-riot afflicted cities have responded with a little more sense and flexibility than in Ferguson.  During daylight and the official (and peaceful) protests, they're notable for their absence, leaving the protesters to march and wave signs and speechify in peace.  Only after the sun goes down, when the thugs start to come out, do the police show up -- usually to form a defensive perimeter around local police stations and city halls, using non-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets, tear-gas, smoke grenades, and flash-bangs. 

In the last two days, though, the thugs have taken to attacking less politically-significant and more richly lootable targets, such as banks, top-scale department stores, car dealershps, and even the CNN headquarters.  The police are kept guessing just where the thugs will strike next, smashing windows in an odd similarity to the historic Kristallnacht.  This shift in targets has led the beleaguered CNN, at least, to blame the damage on "White supremacists" -- though this is hard to reconcile with righteous Black protesters.

We can probably leave the ousting of the looter/provocateur thugs to the Black organizers themselves, who are not at all happy with "outsiders" damaging the reputation of their legitimate protests, but the questions remain;  just who are these thugs, where do they come from, and just who is organizing them?  Who seriously wants to damage the US's reputation and economy?  There are plenty of suspects: agents of China, Russia, Iran, and even the Democratic National Committee -- who have shown willingness to do almost anything to Get Trump.  At the moment it's the latter who look the most likely, given that a lot of the thugs have proved to be members of Antifa and BLM.  If so, then when the Black organizers expose the tactic, it will backfire royally in the DNC's face.  This may well add to the growth of the Blexit movement, as better-educated Black Americans decide to stop being automatic supporters of the Democrats. 

All that the police need do to bring this about is to institute a nationwide program of using stunners as their main weapons.  Let's see how many of them have the sense to do it.

--Leslie <;)))><   



      

    

Encounter With a "Demon"

I've told this story before, but I think it bears repeating.

When I was about 13 I had an encounter with a psychic being that wasn't benign and wasn't entirely human.  At the time, I called it The Driver.  Yes, it really did try to set up permanent residence in my mind, and I had to go to some effort to get rid of it.  I suppose it fits some of the definitions of a "demon", though I'd like to know what religion would own up to it.

It was on a school night, and I was up in my bedroom, plodding through my homework and avoiding my parents who were fighting again downstairs.  It was late, I'd zipped through the English assignment and was dreading the Math portion, when I heard another voice in my head.  At first it was just a buzzing presence that sounded and felt like nothing I'd ever encountered, but after awhile it began coming up with coherent concepts if not words -- and what it wanted was a task.  Apparently it had been attracted by the sound of my mind grinding through the homework;  what it wanted was data to process, and I'd just been absorbing a lot of that.  It nagged in a near-mechanical voice, and it would not shut up. 

As it kept yattering I got a clearer impression of its mind, and what I saw was incomplete, nearly mechanical, lacking a good 90% of the "feel" of other people or animals.  It wanted to attach to another mind so as to get data to process, and it didn't seem to care about anything -- anything -- else.  If a computer could have awareness, it would feel like this. 

I cautiously asked it what kind of data it wanted, and it replied "no preference" -- as if it were hungry for data and didn't care what it ate.  I could also feel that when it came to processing the data, The Driver would do a very competent job.

"Oh, cool," I decided.  "Then do my Math homework."  And I opened my Math workbook and turned to the first page. 

With a buzz of satisfaction, The Driver absorbed the figures through my eyes and began churning out solutions, which I then wrote down.  I soon saw that none of the figures -- or the process of adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing them -- went through my own mind.  I wasn't practicing the Math;  I was only observing somebody else do it.  I wasn't really learning anything.  The homework got done in record time, and when I checked a few of the exercises I found that they were all correct.  I hated Math, so that was fine with me.

The Driver, however, wasn't satisfied.  The moment the last exercise was finished, it started nagging for more work.  Well, all right;  I still had the History homework to read, so I opened my textbook and started reading the assigned chapter.  The Driver eagerly absorbed the words through my eyes, but it didn't seem to know what to do with them except to store them away in its memory -- a memory, I saw, that was enormous -- but wasn't going to be shared.  This annoyed me, because I liked History and had wanted to store that information in my own memory, thank you, and do some thinking about it myself.  I deliberately slowed my reading down so that I could see and memorize the concepts in the sentences, but this annoyed The Driver, which just wanted more and more words as fast as it could get them.  In effect, I had to read everything twice -- once, quickly, for The Driver, and a second time, slower, for me.  By the time I finished the chapter I was growing annoyed with my uninvited psychic guest.  I was also tired and wanted to get to sleep.

But now another annoyance appeared;  The Driver simply would not shut up.  It kept nattering, nagging, wanting more data, more data.  I knew I couldn't sleep with that noise going on, That meant that I had to somehow get rid of my unwelcome guest.  But how?  Ignoring it didn't work, and trying to flood it out with my own thoughts didn't work either.  In fact, The Driver didn't even seem to notice that I was trying to throw it out;  it just kept demanding a mental task to perform.  It was only a fragment of a personality, not a whole mind.   

At that point I realized that The Driver had no natural instincts: not even a sense of self-preservation.

So I asked it flat out: "How do I get rid of you?"

The Driver treated that like any other intellectual problem, and gave me an answer: "Overload."

That was all I needed.  "Okay," I said, "I have a task for you.  Determine the nature and purpose of the entire universe.  Correlate all data, starting now."

I could hear/feel the "working" hum of The Driver starting its task, and as I felt it processing all its data, I heard the tone of the hum rising steadily.  Guessing that I'd better be thoroughly out of the way when that humming reached its climax, I got into my pajamas and then into bed, pulled up the blankets and blanked my mind, and did my best to go to sleep.  The last thing I remembered before sleep closed in was the rising hum of The Driver processing all that data.  I was thoroughly asleep before my unwelcome visitor overloaded itself and tore loose.

I woke up late the next morning and had to scramble to get dressed in time for the schoolbus, but I remembered all that had happened the night before -- and I readily saw that The Driver was gone.  My mind was entirely my own again.  Nobody was talking there but me.

And the thing never came back.   

I thought about that all the rest of the day, wondering about the nature of The Driver.  It was a totally psychic being, and not much of one: just a fragment of a mind that had somehow torn loose from its original personality, taking that mind's psychic ability with it, that had gone searching for another mind to attach itself to and ever-more data to feed on.. I wondered how many minds, before me, the thing had traveled through -- how much data it had gathered from them, and how those other people had gotten rid of the thing.  I never came up with any answers, but the incident gave me a whole new perspective on the old story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

All I got out of that incident was some understanding of just what a "demon" is, and how to get rid of them without benefit of clergy.  Of course I have no proof for any of this, since the entire incident played out inside my own skull, but the ideas are intriguing.  Anybody who wants to is free to take and run with them.   

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(


   

 

An Occasionally Psychic Childhood

...Or, Now for Something Completely Different

My first psychic experience that I can remember happened when I was six, and my family was still living in an apartment in East Orange, New Jersey.  The building was laid out in a U-shape, with the open end facing the street and a parking-lot in the back.  Our apartment was on the first floor, which was slightly raised above ground level, with a short stairway leading down to the main door. 

The only garbage service we had came around to the cans in the parking lot, and we had one enameled steel garbage can under the kitchen sink.  When we wanted to dump the garbage, we had to carry the can -- and the three waste-baskets, one tan, one pink, one white -- out our front door, down the steps, out the main door, down the short building steps, along the sidewalk to the passage through the bottom of the U, then around to the parking-lot in the back, and up to the full-sized garbage-cans.  This was something of a chore, and I certainly didn't enjoy doing it, even once a week, when Mom would help.  She'd usually carry the heavy enamel can and one of the waste-baskets, and leave me to haul the other two.  The baskets were comparatively light, but hauling them all the way around to the parking-lot was heavy work for a little kid. 

We also had a second-hand washing machine in the basement, which had a lot of scrapes in the enamel, where rust was beginning to show up.  Pop kept promising that he'd give that washer a coat of enamel paint to stop the rust from spreading, and one lazy Saturday he set out to do just that.  With the help of a neighbor he wrestled the washer out of the basement and into the parking-lot.  The neighbor took off, Dad brought the paint and brush and paint-tray around to the parking-lot and began painting over the scrapes.  I toddled after him and watched, having nothing else to do, while he made an artistic job of it. 

He paused for a moment to evaluate his work, then told me: "Sweetling, go get the white wastebasket and bring it here."

What he said was "white wastebasket", but I got a distinct impression -- a vision -- of the white enameled garbage-pail from under the kitchen sink.  Somehow I knew that that was what he really meant. 

So I toddled off, across the parking-lot, through the passageway, up the sidewalk, up the building-stairs, through the main door, up the front steps, into the apartment, into the kitchen and under the sink.  Fortunately the can was empty, otherwise I'd never have been able to drag it out.  The thing was nearly as tall and heavy as I was.  Still, I wrestled it across the kitchen, down the hallway, out the apartment door and then -- sitting down and pushing it with my feet -- down the front steps, through the building front door (which wasn't easy, the door being heavy and liable to swing shut), and then down the building stairs -- likewise sitting down and pushing with my feet.  Once down on the sidewalk I paused for breath and asked myself why I was going to all this effort;  after all, what Pop had said was "white wastebasket".  Nonetheless, I knew that what he'd really meant was "white enameled garbage-can from under the kitchen sink".  So, as soon as I'd gotten my breath back, I persevered: down the sidewalk, through the passageway...

And as I came thumping around the corner into the parking-lot I heard Pop call: "Oh, Sweetling, I made a mistake.  I meant the enameled white garbage-can from under the kitchen sink."

Uhuh.

Yes, I brought him the can.  No, I didn't keep quiet about my vision.  I crowed about it until Pop wearily told me to shut up already and let him paint.  I don't  remember how Pop got the washing-machine back into the basement, or the enameled can back under the sink.  Given how long it would have taken for the paint to dry, he would have done it after I'd gone to bed, or maybe even the next day. 

I don't remember any specific incidents after that -- just that I got along well with animals, and could always tell what they were thinking or feeling -- until I was around eleven.

It was a school day and I was in  gym class, standing in line with a bunch of other girls, waiting for my turn to throw a basketball at the basket, and bored out of my skull.  I didn't like any of the team sports taught in school;  I liked the "weird" sports -- horseback-riding, canoeing, archery -- stuff usually done by myself.  I'd also begun taking an interest in Rock music, at least what got onto our household radio.  So, while I stood in line, bored out of my skull, I heard a popular soft-rock song playing through my head, complete with words.  It somewhat surprised me, because it wasn't a song I particularly liked or would normally remember (and to this day I can't remember the title). 

Then, a moment later, the girl right in front of me began humming the exact same tune.

This time I had better sense than to mention the peculiar coincidence.  What I noticed this time was that these incidents happened when I was in a particular mood: awake but not concentrating on anything, sort-of daydreaming.  After that I also began taking an interest in what I'd learned to call "psychic phenomena". 

And after that it got complicated.

--Leslie <;)))><         

   

Not "When" But "What": Reopening the Economy

It's obvious that we can't leave the economy shut down much longer, and the restrictions on business have got to relax soon.  The problem, at least here in the USA, is that our sheer size and geography makes for very different conditions all over the country.

This is why Trump left responses to the pandemic up to the local governors, rather than set nation-wide standards, as the Democrats nagged him to do. 

Here in Arizona, for example -- where half the population is clustered in one large city, two small cities, and the other half scattered in small towns across the whole state -- "social distancing" isn't much of a problem.  Like most other states, we were caught short on Covid-19 testing devices -- not so much on masks, gowns, gloves, and ventilators.  Our major outbreaks were centered around the usual old-folks-dying-houses and a recent tribal powwow on the Navaho lands.  Outside of the state, nobody seems to realize that the Indian tribes (Oooooh, excuse me: "Native Americans") are a major chunk of Arizona's population and political powers.  Therefore, nobody but the Arizona governor could be expected to understand just what this state's reaction to the plague should be.

The problem with this decentralized approach is that it allowed various governors to sneak certain political hobby-horses into the emergency protocols, usually by declaring just which industries they considered "essential".  By now we're all familiar with the Michigan governor banning sales of gardening seeds, and the Virginia governor trying to shut down gun-stores.  We're also familiar with the local revolts and protests against the same, all of which have been energetically denounced by the Democrat-leaning media. 

Therefore it makes sense that Trump would both announce that the re-opening of the economy should be up to the local governors -- or even mayors -- and that he would scold particular governors and mayors who stepped into the political stratosphere.  And of course it follows that the Democrats and their media-flacks would denounce him for both actions. 

So what have we learned for ourselves that is really necessary to control the pandemic while getting the country back to work? 

Basically, we have to keep the six-foot distance in public, wash and clean everything we can as often as we can, and not go out in public without wearing some kind of mask covering the nose and mouth.  Now this face-covering doesn't have to be the full N95 medical-quality mask that can filter out particles as small as the virus itself.  It only has to be thick enough to stop the aerosols -- the tiny droplets of water in our breath -- which the virus lives and travels in.  A common allergy-mask, or painter's mask, or carpenter's mask, or even a Bandito-style folded bandana mask can do that.  Simply passing all this information around to the populace can accomplish that.  The public is not stupid, regardless of what the Democratic National Committee may think. 

In fact, businesses and common citizens in most states have already taken their own steps in that direction.  The last time I went out to get food, the customers at the supermarket were wearing assorted masks and carefully keeping six feet apart, at the bank there were tape-markers on the floor  guiding the customers to stay six feet apart, at the local MacDonald's there were similar tape-guides on the floor (and the dining section was closed, so the store sold only carry-out or deliveries), and all the employees were distanced and wearing various masks.  The governor had not given any such orders;  the people did it themselves. 

There's no reason to think that they can't extend that to the rest of the economy.  The publicized cases of meat-processing plants providing hotbeds of infection have spurred those companies -- perhaps under the sharp rowel of threatened lawsuits -- to redesign whole factories for maximum space and hygiene, and other factories are following suit.  Schools, from colleges down to grade-schools, have taken seriously to selling online courses -- and home-schooling has gained a whole new popularity.  White-collar industries, like investing and consulting, have made creative use of teleconferencing.  Service industries have been decentralizing with a vengeance.  The economy is adapting, rapidly, on its own -- without "national guidance". 

Perhaps this is exactly what the political leftists fear, since what isn't "guided" can't be controlled.

The other guideline we keep hearing is "universal testing", how we can't go back to a "normal" economy unless everybody in the country is tested for the corona virus.  This is impossible, for several reasons.  First, people keep forgetting that the US has the third largest population in the world -- 330 million that we know about, and probably another 20 million that we don't -- and even with all the test-manufacturing companies in the country running day and night, we couldn't turn out 330 million tests within a year.  Second, there are two forms of test: the mucous test which shows if the live virus is present, and the blood ("serology") test which shows if specific coronavirus antibodies are present.  The mucous test would have to be applied every day, because a person can test negative on one day and positive on the next;  now we're talking about billions of tests.  The serology test would be more useful, since one of the proposed treatments for Covid-19 is collecting and cloning antibodies from people -- or animals -- who have had the virus and recovered, and injecting them into active patients, but that too would take millions of tests and well over a year, at least. 

Likewise we can't wait for a vaccine, which would take-- according to the FDA and CDC -- about a year to get out to the public. 

The best solution would be to develop some reliable cures, which is what Trump has been pushing for -- and therefore the Democrats have been denouncing and decrying almost frantically.  Early, and small, trials of hydrochloroquine plus azythromicin and zinc, remdesivir, and convalescent plasma have shown very good results -- but later trials reported from China claim they don't work.  Then again, we've learned that we can't trust anything we hear from China.  The best place to get trials done would be in Israel, but nobody's mentioning that. 

One might almost think that everyone politically an inch to the left of Clint Eastwood wants to keep the American economy hobbled, the various US govts. hemorrhaging money, and a good 30 million voters living on Unemployment.  Gee, why should they want that?  As if we couldn't guess.  *Sigh*

So what we're stuck with is how to reopen businesses, re-hire all those suddenly unemployed, and avoid a surge in Covid-19 infections, and we have to do it quickly. 

The question isn't when, but how -- and the citizens have already taken their own steps to do that.  All they need is permission, and a bit of encouragement. 

--Leslie <;)))>< 



             

Healthcare and Rights

While surfing the 'net I came across an amazing claim by the notorious AOC -- whom I prefer to call Alldyslexia Occasional Cortex -- claiming that the Covid-19 virus is "racist" because, in New York anyway, it has infected a higher percentage of Black people than White people.  Never mind that it has affected a lower percentage of Latinos and Asians than either Blacks or Whites, or affected men more than women, or the very old more than the very young, or city-dwellers more than rural people.  No, it has to be about ray-ray-racism, and the solution is to pay "reparations".  Uhuh. 

It's not surprising that AOC, like BLM, has turned accusations of racism into an extortion racket.  What's interesting is her underlying claim, shared by leftists ideologues all over the US, that "healthcare is a human right".  I've also heard the related query: "why is bearing firearms a right and healthcare isn't?"  That deserves a closer look.

To exercise your 2nd Amendment rights (never mind the 1st Amendment) you must take action yourself.  You must pay for the firearms (or other personal weapons) -- and the ammunition, and the targets, and the range-time, and the training, and the carry-license fees -- yourself.  If you abuse the right -- say, by shooting innocent people -- then you get arrested and tried and pay the penalty all by yourself.  To misquote the old folksong, nobody else can do it for you;  you've got to use and pay for the right all by yourself.  It's all on you.  The right itself is free -- except for occasional wars to defend it;  it's the exercising of it that costs, and it costs only yourself.   

Healthcare is something totally different.  Aside from simple preventatives (like diet, exercise, and hygiene), and simple treatments (like disinfectants, bandages, over-the-counter medicines like aspirin and cough-syrup), healthcare involves other people.  For ailments more serious than a common cold you go to see a doctor, and probably his/her nurse (and, doubtless, his/her medical-insurance clerk).  Very likely, the doctor will send you to a laboratory for tests.  If the tests reveal a problem that a simple general-practitioner can't handle, the doctor will refer you to a specialist (and the specialist's nurse and insurance-clerk), or possibly to a hospital.  This involves a lot of people, all of whom have gone through extensive -- and expensive -- training, for which they're often still paying.  In brief, it involves a lot of other people's labor. 

Since the end of the Civil War, no American has had a right to other people's labor. 

Now you may argue, and rightly so, that members of the medical community tend to overprice their labor -- particularly the pharmaceutical companies -- but that's another story, and subject to other solutions.  The point is that other people's labor, overpriced or not, does not come free;  it must be paid for.

 It's on the question of "who pays", and how, that the problem of "rights" re-emerges.  The medical business has overpriced itself to the point where only the super-rich can afford to pay for their healthcare directly.  Everyone else, over the past century, has become obliged to pay through the insurance business.  This only moves the problem one step back, because insurance -- being a service, and a business -- mus also be paid for.  Our society has determined, likewise over the past century, that equal access to businesses is also a right -- one that can't be denied on grounds of race, sex, or religion.  This applies to insurance as much as to lunch-counters.   

Subtler grounds such as ethnic group, age, ancestry, political party, or country of origin are still being argued.  The way this works out on the question of health-insurance is that anybody can have access to the service, but the amount paid varies.  A single person, buying health insurance for themself, would pay more or less, depending on all the above variables. 

This is where a form of "herd immunity" comes into play;  a group purchasing insurance for its members can get equal insurance for all of them, regardless of individual differences, provided that the group is large enough for the insurance company to expect a reliable, uniform payment from the group.  This is why so many Americans gain their health insurance through their job, or their labor union, or their church, or their sports-club, and the right to equal access -- for all members of the group -- would apply.  The bigger the group, the lower the fees would be per individual.  The biggest group in America is the whole electorate: all the citizens, all the voters, all the taxpayers.  The organizers of such large groups can't be smaller than the state or federal governments;  thus we have state Welfare health-insurance and federal Social Security/Medicare insurance.  All citizens -- and in some states non-citizens -- have equal access to these.  Likewise, tax money goes to pay for federal, state and even municipal public-health services -- which, again, service the groups -- and to which all members of those groups have a right to equal access.  

This is as far into the area of "rights" as healthcare can legitimately go -- regardless of what AOC, or Bernie Sanders, or any of the Socialist Democrats may claim. 

--Leslie <;)))><                       


        

The Political Profits of Plague-Panic, Part Two

Related to my last post, understand that the government and culture of China have been frantically arrogant for the last several centuries.  They call their country "the middle kingdom", which means they see themselves as far above all other people on Earth as the gods are above them.  One result of this almost-desperate arrogance has been an addiction to playing Economic Warfare with their trade partners, no matter how much damage it does them, which accounts for the Opium Wars of the 1800s.  Another result has been their tendency to make war on neighbors who were no threat to them, which explains why China is thoroughly hated by its neighbors;  this explains why, during the Vietnam war, the government of North Vietnam went for help to Russia to help fight the Americans rather than having anything to do with China.  Another result is that the Chinese govt. would rather lose thousands -- if not millions -- of its enormous population than lose "face" before the rest of the world. 

Thanks to the wonders of modern communications, China has been furiously embarrassed before the rest of the world thanks to the Corona virus.  This explains why the Chinese govt. made the amazing claim that "US soldiers" brought the virus to China.  Anybody can ask just when the US last had troops in China, and everybody knows that the virus came from Wuhan, China, regardless of what any politician says.  China has done better at claiming its numbers of Covid-19 infected have "peaked" and its people are going back to work -- with no evidence except the govt.'s own word.   

Not that this stops any politician, religious leader, or media flack from throwing ridiculous claims and accusations around. 

The govts. and assorted mullahs/imams/ayatollahs of the Arab countries, from Iran on down, have blamed the virus on the US, Israel, and the Jews in general.  Interestingly enough, their orders to their subjects vary wildly.  Some command the Faithful to go out and infect as many infidels as they can reach.  Others ignore the WHO's safety protocols and hold mass prayer-meetings on the assumption that the virus will spare the Faithful, despite the reported growing number of mass graves in Iran.

From the rest of Asia we hear either silence or brags, such as South Korea, which boasts that it has now given its entire population virus tests, or North Korea, which is saying nothing.

In Europe the politics are more volatile and complex.  Italy, after begging for help from anyone who could give it, has closed its borders and is going into complete lockdown;  there are rumors, nothing proven, that the govt. is planning to start deporting all those "migrants" who overstrained its public services in the first place.  France has tried to instate the WHO's protocols only to face riots from its "migrant" population, and is considering using its military to clean out the migrant enclaves.  Other European countries have shut down their borders completely, in defiance of EU regulations and despite howls from the media/academia about a "political shift to the Right".  In fact, a lot of countries are pulling toward autonomy again, away from the EU in general.  The whole "globalism" trend is in danger of falling apart. 

It's in the US that the politics of the plague-panic become really visible.  The Democrats, in their near-frenzy to Get Trump, first denounced him for his earlier actions of thinning out the CDC bureaucracy, sneered at his vague and weakly optimistic speeches, and demanded that he use the powers of the fed. govt. to doooo something.  In fact, what Trump was dooooing was quietly going around to the pharmaceutical and medical-supply corporations, and others, and flogging them into pulling their manufacturing out of China and back into the US -- and stepping up production fast. (Another thing most Americans don't realize is that during the Obama administration China gained an enormous share -- at least 70% -- of the American pharmaceutical and medical-supply business.  Trump has been working to reverse that.)  For this he used the stick of the Wartime Production Act and the carrot of "stimulus" rewards.  What else could have persuaded Ford, of all companies, to go into the ventilator-manufacturing business?  This is also why the Republican "stimulus" bill included payoffs to certain corporations as well as small businesses. 

After the WHO declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic, Trump was obliged to declare a national emergency, which included outlining the WHO's protocols for curtailing the spread of the virus.  He certainly knew what this would do to the economy, so he left implementation of the protocols up to local state and city govts. -- which responded with widely varying tactics.

Interestingly enough, states with Democrat governors instituted the most draconian regulations, including attempts at -- of all things -- gun-control laws, not to mention damaging the local economies.  For example, Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles threatened to cut off water and power to any "non-essential" business that refused to close.  This seriously annoyed the more libertarian voters, and won the Democrats no friends.  Nonetheless, the Democrats insisted that Trump show "more leadership", and use the various federal govt. powers to enforce uniform compliance.  The stock-market took a precipitous nosedive, bounced back, dived again, and cautiously edged back up.  Trump started enacting the War Production Act but held off enforcing it until he got word of the various medical researchers around the world finding workable treatments for Covid-19.  When he announced the treatments -- variations on a theme of hydrochloroquine with something else -- his medical adviser, Fauco, expressed the usual caution about the need for testing (doctors who promise cures tend to get sued).  Various Democrats used that excuse to denounce Trump's claims of hope;  the governor of Nevada went so far as to pass a law forbidding the medical use of hydrochloroquine as treatment for Covid-19.  Other Democrat politicians have loudly denounced Trump's efforts to get businesses open and running again by Easter, even as those companies that Trump flogged into emergency production have sent some 9 million doses of chloroquine to New York's public health services to be tried on those 15,000 New Yorkers who  have tested positive for Covid-19.  The testing started last Monday, and the first trials should be finished in ten days. 

One has to wonder just what the Democrats are trying to accomplish -- especially that Nevada governor.  Certainly the stock-market dive and partial shutdown of the economy work in their favor, since Trump's main appeal to the voters is the previously booming economy. But would they really go so far as to hold off on treatments for the virus, and to keep the economy depressed, just to discourage potential Trump voters?

Judging from the political craziness we've seen in other countries, I couldn't swear it's impossible.

--Leslie <;)))><