The Biden administration has always been a Potemkin construct, a sham.  Every single person knows that he is simply mentally unfit, and everybody has known it since before the laughable election.  Some people lie about this because he’s their guy — they won’t admit it — but they know nonetheless.  Always did.

And this installation of a bumbling incompetent is not an accident.  Biden is prima facie in charge of nothing, therefore somebody else is, or somebodies else are.  I lean toward the latter.  There is indeed a conspiracy, it’s just not a well-organized one.  This whole thing is a tremendous exercise in the government becoming unaccountable.  People throughout government, media, and the actual Democrat party apparatus knew this, and willfully worked to install this marionette — each striving to get their hands on a string.

Well, it finally happened.  Two years on, inexorably and inevitably, I caught the ‘rona.  It’s hardly surprising, really, since I have been going about my business, carefully, but pretty much normally from the start, as have most of my family, my friends, my neighbors, and my own little corner of the world.  I had both the original Pfizer shots, late last Spring.  I’m not “boosted,” as I don’t subscribe to the idea that showing up every few months for another shot will do anything other than–over the course of time–make me even more susceptible to new variants increasingly clever enough to evade them.

And anyway, I heard Dr. Fauci say that–sooner or later–everyone would get Omicron.  So there.

I’m 67 years old.  I’m in pretty good health, although I could stand to lose just a few pounds.  I don’t have any of the commonly cited co-morbidities, and other than a diagnosis of early sarcoid in my lungs and lymph nodes over 30 years ago (which is monitored and buys me an annual chest CT scan to look at problem areas), I’m the picture of what the Victorians used to call “rude health.”

The hostages ran away from the hostage-taker. They saved themselves. “‘First of all, we escaped. We weren’t released or freed,” said Cohen, who was one of four people in the synagogue for services that many other Congregation Beth Israel members were watching online.'” Then the FBI stormed the building, and shot the bad guy dead.

So how come the press reports it differently?

I’ve never understood the airport security thing since 9-11.  They are looking for weapons, when I think they should be looking for people.  People, for example, like the Texas synagogue terrorist, who had a history of criminal behavior, mental illness, and anti-Semitism.  But Muslim terrorists killed thousands of people with box-cutters, so now I have to take my shoes off to get on an airplane?  I’m a 53-year-old Lutheran from Ohio, not a 23-year-old Muslim from Pakistan.  What do my shoes have to do with national security?  An article in The New York Post touched on this yesterday:

American travelers put up with a vast amount of security theater: millions of man-hours lost each year to unpredictably long TSA lines; intrusive pat-downs; the whole take-off-your-shoes-and-belt rigamarole. Yet the vast security apparatus can’t screen out a mentally ill Muslim extremist?

Americans need to demand that our Homeland Security apparatus be completely redesigned.  They should be looking for people, not weapons.  Which will be difficult politically, because a lot of those people (although not all) will be Muslims.  But saving lives can be difficult.  Regardless, the first thing we need to do is recognize the existence of reality.  We need to agree that what we’re doing right now makes no sense whatsoever.  Let’s start there.  Perhaps this latest synagogue attack will start the discussion.

Al’s Rules for Political Discussion

Personally, I have been appalled by the level of intellectual honesty in today’s political discussion. Cable news and social media have a big influence in driving discussions that everyday people engage in. I have asked myself what value I get from discussions that I have been a part of. Answer is not much. So, I have thought about this and would like to share a set of rules I am following whenever I become involved in such discussions. Here are my rules.

I don’t understand.  I’ve never had patients send me links to podcasts about high blood pressure or gastroparesis, but with COVID, it’s every day.  I’ve never been threatened by insurance companies that if I use a certain drug to treat a certain disease, they will remove me from their plans.  I’ve never been threatened by the CDC that I could lose my medical license if I don’t repeat whatever it is they’re saying today.  This is so odd.  I really don’t get it.

Joe Rogan must be thinking the same thing.  Some group has demanded that Spotify no longer carry Mr. Rogan’s podcasts (which average 11 million listeners EACH), with a letter which includes the following passage:

The episode has been criticized for promoting baseless conspiracy theories and the JRE has a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.

The jab is a vaccine, or at least that’s what it’s called, but it really isn’t.  It is not a vaccine as vaccines were once understood.  It is an invasive genetic delivery therapy and consists of an injected mixture containing nanocarbon fibers, lipids, and strands of mRNA designed specifically to reprogram a cell’s DNA, its genes, and its purpose.  Instead of say, assembling within a scaffold of proteins designed to contract on command (example: muscle cell), the former muscle cell is reprogrammed by the mRNA to give up its duties and madly make COVID spike proteins until it burns out.

mRNA must work quickly or it breaks down.  It cannot enter a cell on its own.  Enter dense lipids, to protect the mRNA, and carbon nanoparticles to penetrate cell walls and allow the mRNA to enter a cell.  The manufactured spike proteins leak out of the now compromised cell and drift though the circulatory and lymphatic systems, until they locate an ACE2 receptor on the surface of cell and bind with it.  In theory, this would close a pathway for a potential COVID cell infection.  In addition, these circulating spike proteins will eventually be recognized by your immune system as invasive and will prompt an antibody response to neutralize them.  These same antibodies would respond to actual proteins on a COVID spike, effectively neutralizing any COVID viruses post-exposure.

Historically, vaccines for viral infections have been incredibly effective.  Small pox?  Eradicated.  Polio?  Virtually eliminated.  Chickenpox, the mumps, the measles, rubella, whooping cough?  Gone.  In the public mind, viral vaccinations are miraculous.  So, when this new mRNA technology was elevated to “vaccine” status, the CDC and NIH effectively tapped into the public’s vaccine goodwill.  But this new “vaccine” wasn’t a vaccine at all.  It was gene therapy, both unproven and unapproved.  The definition change is an old-fashioned bait and switch.

Bishop Anselm of Canterbury is another awesome philosopher I like, and another one the learning of whom I’ve made easy for you through a new series of YouTube/Rumble videos. And, for those who want to read a few paragraphs instead of watching a video of a philosophy nerd talking, here are four pointers on Anselm.

First, the point of Anselm’s book, the Proslogion, is fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” This is a more succinct version of Augustine’s idea that “Unless you believe, you will not understand” and a bunch of Augustiney epistemology and theology that goes with it.

Trust comes first, understanding later. We don’t understand in order to believe, but vice versa.

My wife likes to read obituaries. Seems a little ghoulish to me, but sometimes we find out about the passing of old friends or neighbors and get a chance to go pay our respects. More often, though, she is just reading about dead strangers. Every now and then she sees a life that sounds inspiring and shares it with me. Recently she showed me the obituary of a man from town named Iulian Pop who passed away at age 83.

An excerpt from the obituary reads: