Month: September 2022

How many of you remember that cute little saying, “when you and a friend are being chased by a lion, you do not have to run faster than the lion, but merely faster than your friend.”

In my bizarre way of thinking I thought of that saying when I was reading an article by Joseph Mercola. (For those of you not familiar with him, Dr. Mercola is an American alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet business personality.) His opinion piece from The Epoch Times, Health was titled “US Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Decline.”

Granted Dr. Mercola is not infrequently at odds with how the AMA, CDC, NIH, etc think, but the following is from the Main Stream Media …according to the latest statistics reported by The New York Times, August 31, 2022: life expectancy in the United States dropped precipitously in 2020 and 2021. In 2019, the average life span of Americans of all ethnicities was nearly 79 years. By the end of 2021, two years into the COVID pandemic, life expectancy had dropped to 76 — a loss of nearly three years.

Right now you are probably thinking … “not a big surprise, as Covid killed a lot of people.” However, here is where that above saying about the lion comes in. For lack of a more P.C. way of putting it – in 2020, Covid thinned the herd. What I mean here is that the elderly and those with a variety of additional risk factors were, in essence, killed off by Covid in 2020. In other words, that lion caught the slowest runners, or according to another old saying, the low-hanging fruit was picked first. However, the dilemma is not 2020, but rather 2021. Why did the decrease in life expectancy continue in 2021?

And furthermore, excess deaths in 2021 far exceeded deaths labeled as COVID deaths. (“Excess deaths can be calculated by comparing the present death rate compared to the death rates in years past [reported deaths – expected deaths = excess deaths]).

So if there was an increase in ‘excess deaths’ in 2021, and this excess was not due to Covid, what was it due to? A dilemma!

Dr. John Campbell, retired nurse teacher, has reviewed  excess death data in Scotland, where excess mortality is now so high across all age groups that the government has launched a formal inquiry to determine the cause. Data show excess deaths are 11% above the five-year average, and have remained above average for the past 26 weeks.

Excess deaths are also soaring in England and Wales. As reported by The Telegraph, August 18, 2022, for 14 out of the past 15 weeks, England and Wales have averaged an extra 1,000 non-COVID deaths per week above the seven-year average, and the percentage of people dying at home is disproportionally higher than expected (28.1% higher than statistical norm).

According to The Telegraph, the spike in excess deaths became very noticeable around the end of April 2022, and, if this trajectory continues, the number of non-COVID excess deaths will outpace COVID deaths in 2022. 

What about in the U.S?

A National Institutes of Health preprint, published mid-May 2022, reviewed excess all-cause mortality across 3,127 counties in the U.S. between March 2020 and December 2021. While a majority of the excess deaths were attributed to COVID (which we know possibly only means they had a positive PCR test at the time of death, or within a certain time period of death), 171,168 excess deaths were not attributable to COVID. So, why did so many people die that “shouldn’t” have? 

The dilemma continues. The plot thickens!

Unexplained deaths among children under the age of 19 as well as unexplained deaths in young healthy adults has increased. Hmmm! 

The dilemmas continue even more so!

Without beating around the bush, Dr. Mercola explains these various dilemmas by postulating that the excess death rate, especially in younger adults, is due to the Covid vaccine.

Is his conclusion true? Frankly, I do not know, but, to me, it is indeed plausible. However, do not worry since ‘those that know best’ will be working overtime to explain these dilemmas … NOT!

9/21/22

californiacontrarian

It’s always amazing to me that some people are so naturally smart that they know everything. Err … rather they think that they know everything. Are they precocious or merely braggadocious? One such person appears to be Evan Low, a California representative from Campbell, Ca. Mr. Low’s past education included Community college and two years at San Jose State (SJSU) where he majored in political science. He subsequently spent three weeks at JFK’s Harvard School of Government … three weeks!!

I would assume that Evan Low probably had some science in high school and perhaps in Junior college, but the odds are that as a political science major at SJSU, he took no science classes. Likewise I am sure that during his three weeks at Harvard, he did not take any science. I have diligently searched and can find no mention of Evan Low having an M.D. So how is it that Evan Low can portray himself as knowing anything about medicine? 

Recently, he introduced AB 2098, which would amend the state’s Business and Professions Code to give the Medical Board of California (MBC) the discretionary power to discipline physicians or surgeons who spread “misinformation or disinformation” related to COVID-19. The MBC currently has the power to punish doctors charged with unprofessional conduct under the Medical Practice Act for violations including gross negligence, incompetence, dishonesty, or corruption.

“Misinformation,” according to the Aug. 23 Senate Floor analysis, means “false or misleading information about the nature and risks of the virus; COVID-19 prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

Oh, now I get it. Mr. Evan Low must be so precocious that he can author a bill that in essence tells doctors in California that they need to think and speak like him … or else! This despite the fact that Evan Low most likely knows zero, zilch, zippo about medicine. In some circles sponsoring something that dictates to doctors how they must act would be considered braggadocious and not precocious.

9/20/22

The first line of a  front page story in San Diego’s “newspaper” on 9/12/22 was … “. Sailors, their families and military retirees at one San Diego navy base found their church community left out in the cold as the Navy announced that it will cancel all Roman Catholic services.”

That story got me thinking of the slow exorable pushing of wokeness and the simultaneous dissing of religion in our military.

Much of what follows comes from an Imprimis piece by retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr: 

Back in 2015 then Secretary of the Navy, Ray Malbus, rejected a Marine Corps study concluding that gender-integrated combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately, and that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries.

That same year the Department of Defense opened all combat jobs in the U.S. military to women, and the Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, committed to “gender-neutral standards” … btw, eight years later, there is still not a “gender-neutral test,” because women do not score as high as men on the tests that have been suggested.

In 2015 at the end of his second term, President Obama initiated a change on the Pentagon’s policy on transgenders in the military. Before that change could take effect, President Trump put it on hold and then imposed reasonable restrictions on military service by those suffering from gender dysphoria. In January, 2021 only hours after he had been in office, President Biden signed an executive order that did away with any restrictions.

In recent years military fitness standards have been watered down in pursuit of “leveling the playing field.”

Last year the Navy released a training video to help sailors understand the proper way to use personal pronouns.

In 2021 the Biden administration’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, decided to add Ibram X. Kendi’s book on critical race theory, to his list of recommended readings.

This summer multiple media outlets reported on training materials at West Point on the problems of “whiteness.” When asked about this, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, General Mark Miley became very defensive … “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white.”

Referring back to what the Navy is trying to do at churches on Navy bases, a few years back something similar was being considered at on base Navy churches, and President Trump emphatically basically said, … 

no way; not on my watch!

After carefully reading the above have you noticed a pattern?  Hmmm, it appears that the rise in wokefullness in the military has come under Democratic presidents. I am worried that if another Democrat is elected as President in 2024, in a few years our military fitness tests will be relegated to tiddlywinks and pin-the-tail-on -the-donkey!

“WAKE UP, AMERICA!”

9/19/22

As is my usual modus operandi, on Sunday I pay tribute to someone who we should respect because of his/her unselfish action. Mykel Gordon is such a person … a hero, actually a hero X3. Each of these three individual situations would qualify Mykel Gordon as a hero.

#1

From CBS News:

Dramatic video shows a Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Chick-fil-A employee, Mykel Gordon, tackling a man who allegedly tried to carjack a woman with a baby. The suspect, identified as William Branch, was arrested by authorities in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. 

Armed with a stick, Branch allegedly approached a woman in the parking lot outside of Chick-fil-A as she was getting a baby out of the car. He then demanded her keys, grabbed them from her waistband and tried to take the car, the sheriff’s office said. 

The Chick-fil-A employee, identified by the restaurant as Mykel Gordon, intervened after hearing the woman screaming. Part of the video of the encounter shows Gordon wrestling Branch to the ground and pinning him until more people show up to help. 

Sheriff’s deputies said Branch punched the employee in the face during the tussle. Neither woman was injured.

“A major shout-out to this young man for his courage!” the sheriff’s office wrote.

#2

Authorities said Gordon told deputies that Branch had been involved in another incident at the restaurant on Wednesday. A second incident report alleged that about 10 minutes before the attempted carjacking, Branch reached into another woman’s vehicle, unlocked the driver’s door and got into the car.

He then sat on top of the woman, “placing all of his bodyweight” on her, and told her to get out, according to the report. After the woman screamed for help, Gordon intervened and chased off Branch, the report said.

#3

From The Washington Post:

Wednesday’s incident was not the first time Gordon put himself in harm’s way to help someone while on the clock. In September 2018, while taking orders outside the Fort Walton Beach Chick-fil-A, Gordon was among the first to respond when a crane fell onto a car, the Northwest Florida Daily News reported. A teenage driver and her friend were inside.

Gordon told the paper that he dropped what he was doing and rushed to the girls’ vehicle, carrying one of them to safety. Other bystanders eventually assisted, and the group helped the other girl safely escape, the Daily News reported.

Back in 2018, Gordon said: “My step dad is a military man and I grew up doing what he was doing. When this happened I knew exactly what to do because of him. I thank God.”

So three times Mykel Gordon didn’t think of his own safety, but rather just reacted … a hero in triplicate!

9/18/22

Are you one of the forty? … The forty ‘what’ you may ask. 

From the Washington Examiner:

“The Justice Department issued 40 subpoenas in the past week, a broad expansion of the inquiry roughly two months before the November midterm elections, the New York Times reported Monday, 9/12/22. The phones of two former Trump advisers, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, were seized as evidence, per the report.”

To me it seems as if the DOJ is entering a “panic phase,” as the public has lost interest in the Jan6 hearings, the Mår-a-Lago raid is turning out to be purely political, and with the midterms coming in less than two months, they need something … anything! It seems similar to a guy with multiple buckets of colored paint randomly tossing varying increments of the different paints onto a canvas, hoping that at some point, a masterpiece will emerge. The thinking being that the more paint is randomly tossed onto the canvas, the greater the chance that something vaguely recognizable will emerge, and if forty subpoenas do not come up with anything, then continue tossing the paint until you reach eighty subpoenas. And if nothing at eighty, then toss another forty splotches of paint against the canvas! Etcetera! The FBI and the DOJ are not exactly Michelangelo!

If you are a Trump supporter, watch out for random paint being thrown at you. If you are thinking ‘no way, Jose,’ perhaps you might ask Mr. Pillow, Mike Lindell, who claimed the FBI seized his phone on Tuesday, 9/13/22.

The businessman said the encounter happened at a Hardee’s drive-thru on his way home from Iowa in Mankato, Minnesota.

Still from the Washington Examiner:

“Mike Lindell goes, ‘We’re taking your cellphone. We have a warrant for your cellphone.’ I go, ‘No.’ I said, ‘My whole company, I run five companies off of that. I don’t have a computer. My hearing aids run off of this. Everything runs off of my phone.” He continued, ‘If I don’t give it to you, will you arrest me then?” At that point, the agents apparently handed him the search warrant for his phone.

Lindell said he was advised by his lawyer, whom he was allowed to call, to hand over his phone to the FBI. He added that he wasn’t given a chance to back up his phone.”

So the Gestspo, err, the FBI and the DOJ, confiscated Lindell’s cellphone. ?for what? Again the thinking goes … if you randomly infringe on the rights of enough individuals, the greater the chance that something recognizable will emerge.

My advice to any random Trump supporter – remember they are not like Michelangelo, so back up your cellphone, your iPad, and your computer, as you never know when you will get some random paint thrown at you.

9/17/22

From The Guardian on 9/14/22

“A teenage girl at a Hollywood high school died on Tuesday, 9/13, and another was hospitalized, after taking what police believe were counterfeit pills filled with fentanyl.

The incident, which is being investigated as a homicide by Los Angeles police, comes as federal officials announced new national counts of overdose deaths, showing nearly 200 people in the US are dying each day due to overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

Since 2019 the US has seen a huge surge in teen overdose deaths, as a flood of counterfeit pills, which look like normal oxycodone, Percocet or Xanax tablets but actually contain fentanyl, have hit the black market.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid so potent that one counterfeit pill can prove fatal. Vast quantities of these fake pills are being smuggled into the US and are circulating in the illicit drug market, meaning that teens often ingest the deadly drug unknowingly.”

Sit down and reread the above paragraph … nearly 200 deaths a day due to opioids, mainly fentanyl! OMG! Drug deaths are still near the highest levels ever recorded, with synthetic opioids including fentanyl being by far the nation’s most deadly drugs.

Where is all this fentanyl coming from? … Duh!! … It is coming across our southern border.

From Border Report 8/21/22:

“According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, officers with the agency’s Office of Field Operations seized approximately 1,800 pounds of fentanyl in July, while U.S. Border Patrol agents who guard the vast border areas between ports of entry seized about 340 pounds.

The amount of fentanyl seized by CBP personnel had fallen for two consecutive months before spiking from 700 pounds in June to 2,100 in July.”

And August does not appear to be any different. 

“From U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement:

U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested two U.S. citizens and seized 340 packages of fentanyl pills near Gila Bend, Arizona, early evening on Wednesday, 8/24/22. These 340 packages of fentanyl pills weighing a grand total of 187 pounds and was worth an estimated $4.3 million.”

Can somebody please explain to me why when our border is obviously a sieve with fentanyl pouring across daily, our President and Vice President continue to try to gaslight us by saying the border is secure?

This leads to a further question … Do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris bear a moral responsibility here. Note that I said, a moral responsibility. It appears that innocent people are dying from fentanyl, and yet they continue to ignore the fentanyl-unsecure border-problem. Could it be that they feel that those who use drugs don’t matter, and so if they die … que sera, sera (what will be, will be)? And if they think that way, what would they tell the parents of that now deceased Hollywood teenager? Hmmm

9/16/22

From Townhall:

One day after President Biden’s dark speech at Independence Hall, warning that the MAGA movement is a threat to democracy, three FBI agents showed up at the door of a Trump supporter based off an anonymous tip that she was at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Explaining the frightening situation on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Lisa Gallagher of New Jersey said her daughter woke her up early in the morning to tell her three armed agents were outside asking for her.

Tucker Carlson opined:

“Imagine armed FBI agents showing up at your house because you supported Trump on Facebook and demanding records of your whereabouts on a date nearly two years ago and of course, the FBI already knew that Lisa Gallagher was not there because they have sophisticated facial recognition software, so they were never planning to arrest her. The point (and this is a theme in every authoritarian regime), the point was to use government agents to intimidate enemies of the regime on the basis of an anonymous tip.”

Mrs. Gallagher and her husband were able to pull out a calendar from January, 2021, and the calendar demonstrated that indeed she was not anywhere near Washington D.C. on 1/6/21.

If you are a Trump supporter, like Lisa Gallagher, perhaps you should be ready for that early morning knock on your door by armed FBI agents. 

Somilarly, if you are a Trump supporter, do you know where you were on a certain date well over a year ago? Specifically do you know where you were on 1/6/21? If you either do not know or cannot document your whereabouts on that particular day, be very afraid as you may be identified as a threat to democracy! After all anybody can be the source of an anonymous tip!

As most of you are aware, I am a Trump supporter. Serendipitously, I know exactly where I was on 1/6/21. Furthermore, I have my Visa statement that documents my whereabouts on that day. “Whew!” for me! What about you?

9/15/22

Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, political commentator, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. 

(For those who aren’t familiar with him, he was born in Gastonia, North Carolina to a poor family in 1930, later growing up in Harlem, New York. Due to financial issues and deteriorated home conditions, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. Upon returning to the United States, Sowell took night classes at Howard University before attending Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1958. He earned his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and received a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.)

He is a black conservative philosopher of sorts who is known for his many wise statements, one of which I happened on recently. He said,

“It’s hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

When I read this I immediately thought of all the inane Covid-related decisions made by “those who knew best,” and who have paid no price for being wrong.

It would be close to impossible to list all of these but to me they basically fall into a few categories:

-Those who were medically in charge of something, including many who were never elected, but merely appointed. This group goes all the way from the “esteemed” Dr. Fauci all the way through those at the CDC, down to and including those medically in command of health departments in various cities and states. This group also includes the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Beccera, a lawyer with no medical training. Those in this group include all of those who ignored the long standing medical concept of immunity due to prior Covid infection.

-Pompous dictates by those in charge of something. This group includes governors,  mayors, city councilmembers and supervisors, heads of school districts, all the way down to principals of certain schools.This group includes many who pronounced, “Get vaccinated or lose your job!”

Many, many of those included in the above categories made erroneous decisions, and most of them are “paying no price for being wrong.” Think of all those who lost their jobs because of non-adherence to vaccine mandates. Who will ultimately be held responsible for that? Will those who were wrong about vaccine mandates be held responsible for the chaos and destruction that occurred to individuals because of these mandates? What about all of the businesses that were destroyed because of forced population isolations? What about those who championed for school closures even though children are minimally affected by Covid? Who will be held responsible for any of the above decisions?

The answer to the question of responsibility is “no one will be held responsible – “they will pay no price for being wrong!” Thomas Sewell is right on target yet again!

9/14/22

My son is a pretty good chess player, and has been such for quite a while. Yes, of course, yours truly taught him how to play the game, but it did not take long for him to begin to consistently beat me. He regularly plays on line, and his online ranking score is very good. When he teaches his students the game, early on he transitions to what is called the “end game.” Put simply, he says that if you don’t master the chess end game, you cannot be a winner at chess.

In baseball, the end game involves the closer. In football it is the field goal kicker. Perhaps a rhetorical question, perhaps not … is there an end game  in war? More specifically is there an end game in the Russia-Ukraine War? And even more specific … is there an end game to the United States’ involvement in that war?

The war in Ukraine has been going on now for about seven months. Prior to the first shots being fired, President Biden appeared to be frozen while Putin amassed around 100,000 of his troops along the Ukraine border. Whereas J.B did not want to upset the Russian bear prior to his invasion, after the invasion he began giving armaments to Ukraine, and perhaps similar to an habitual drug user, it appears that he cannot or does not want to stop. According to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week:

“Senior U.S. officials visiting Ukraine and Germany announced $675 million in new military assistance to Ukraine and $2 billion in additional funding for that country and other nations in the region, as Kyiv launches offensives to try to retake territory captured by Russian troops this year. The military aid will include rockets for multiple-launch rocket systems, four 105 mm howitzers with 36,000 rounds, high-speed missiles to target enemy radar, 5,000 antitank missiles, 1,000 antitank mines, 100 Humvees, 1.5 million rounds of ammunition for small arms, 50 armored medical-treatment vehicles, night-vision equipment, small arms and grenade launchers, a State Department spokesman said.”

According to the Associated Press the White House has provided more than $15 billion to Ukraine since President Biden took office.

$15 billion is a lot … a real lot of money. This is what $15B looks like, $15,000,000,000 … a lot of zeroes! At some point do we need to ask about an end point? Have JB and his advisers discussed this? Is there one?

9/13/22

As is pretty obvious to just about anyone, America has a multitude of problems. And worse, these problems are seemingly snowballing, albeit with the apparent “not my problem” modus operandi of our President. What are some of the issues that J.B. avoids talking about? In his disunifying speech last week he focused on uniting the country by calling Republicans fascists. He did not mention inflation, the deluge of refugees coming across our southern border, the marked increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, mainly involving young adults and adolescents, all of his outdated, now totally inappropriate vaccine mandates, etcetera, etcetera. Granted he could not mention any of these problems because he has, in large part, caused or contributed to them. 

However, after the two horrific recent events in Memphis, one would think that he could be talking about the issue of rising crime. Not surprisingly, JB and his fellow Democrats never mention “crime.”  Why is that? Could it be that the rising crime rate is due to some other basic underlying issue, and thus with good reason, JB and his Dem-cronies do not want to talk about this issue?

From a recent Pew Research study … 

“The U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%).” 

So is there any correlation between fatherless homes and some of our nation’s crime problem?

From America Greatness:

“Fatherless homes lead to family chaos: Children in fatherless homes are four times more likely to live in poverty and are at greater risk for drug and alcohol abuse. About seven out of 10 kids in juvenile detention come from fatherless homes. In fact, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reports that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families. Which leads to the next point: It should be no surprise that 90 percent of school shooters come from fatherless homes.”

Then later from that same piece in America Greatness:

“We should consider what Hungary has put in place for the strengthening of families: it is investing over five percent of its GDP into family policy because it realizes the benefits of a healthy family for its society and its survival. If you look at the above statistics and how detrimental and costly to society fatherless homes are, you can argue, based on the statistics, that an investment like that saves you money in the long run.”

“For the sake of the country and our society, when America First takes power back in this country, it should not hesitate to roll out a plan very similar to Hungary’s: It might be one of the best investments this country would ever make.”

Obviously JB and his Democratic Congress will not bring up this issue. God willing a Republican Congress and a Republican President will address this after 2024.

9/12/22