Category Archives: General Interest

June 16, 2022 · 2:33 pm

More spin war garbage dumping again

My quotes notebook from the 1970s

This post is going to be about politics and current events. The Biden administration tried out some new messaging yesterday by sending a letter to oil execs. urging them to be patriotic and refine more oil. So, the White House messaging moved from “Putin’s inflation” to shifting blame to the oil executives for the high gas prices. This messaging is all a sham, because Biden bought into the far-left green energy policies and tactics long ago. His first day in office he signed an executive order freezing the Keystone pipeline and setting in place a war against fossil fuel. The current situation with gas prices is a direct result of Biden’s war against fossil fuel. The letter to oil executives was nothing more than political theater.

However, the messaging gimmick provides a big clue as to how this White House is going to try to con the American people, by blame-shifting and invoking “patriotism.” Expect more messaging from this White House blabbing about “patriotism.” What will be hilarious to me is if they get so desperate that they start replacing all their identity politics flags and start running around waving the American flag. Wouldn’t that be ironic…

The Biden administration invoked the Defense Authorization Act for the baby formula shortage and I expect more power grabs like that to come. President Trump opened the door for using the Defense Authorization Act dealing with Covid and Biden is now taking that up a notch. A couple days ago there was Twitter buzz that the Biden White House might invoke the Defense Authorization Act with oil production – this would be the Biden administration seizing control over American oil companies, using this crisis as cover. The thing about using the Defense Authorization Act and blabbing about “patriotism” is the US military is still one of the last remaining institutions that most Americans trust and the optics of the US military dealing with a crisis sells that “patriotic” messaging. Underneath these cheap messaging gimmicks are determined, ruthless partisans trying to seize as much power as they can.

I believe the Biden White House and many Democrats would embrace civil unrest or some sort of situation they can hype to use as cover for seizing more control. Since the Obama years, the goal has been to try to federalize policing and take away that power from states and local communities (the “defund the police” effort in 2020, using the George Floyd case was a massive leap forward in that goal of federalizing policing in America.)

The serious part of all of the White House’s actions is they’re trying to make cheap power grabs, while targeting other people as the “bad people” causing all of these problems, that Biden’s own energy policies and failure to respond quickly have compounded.

This pitting Americans against each other has become the easy route for decades with the Democrats’ spin information war, but since Trump it’s escalated. There are also plenty of rabid people on the right selling division and some on the right have embraced “civil divorce,” which anyone seeing how divorces go knows “civil divorces” are the rare exception. Most divorces leave a lot of carnage to clean up or people walk away from them feeling badly battered, especially children.

Yes, Trump “fought back,” but he fought back by embracing the same corrupt spin information war tactics of the Democrats and their liberal media friends. Trump winning Twitter spin battles or jetting around the country staging big rallies to incite the right isn’t a way to unite America or handle the major crises we’re facing now. That road is a road many on the right still cheer. My take on a Trump presidency in 2024 is that Trump a second time around, after J-6 and watching the mixed bag of looney-tunes candidates Trump has endorsed, is be careful what you wish for. There won’t be any Pence or calmer heads in a second Trump presidency – it will be kooky flamethrowers, who are good at stroking Trump’s ego. A whole lot of people on the right are heavily invested in the Trump cult of personality, as much as people on the left were invested in the Obama cult of personality.

Since 1998, I’ve been warning about the dangers of this corrupt spin information war. Having America deeply divided may work to secure short-term partisan political gains, but it will eventually make America ungovernable and lead to a country with raging factions (we might be at this point already,) who rush online to rant and rave or jump into action taking to the streets, reacting to some hot news that they don’t even have the facts about yet. The American people and all of our American institutions are being demolished the longer this spin war drags on. America dividing to the point of civil conflict would doom all of us – there will be no winners there. It would be the collapse of the world’s remaining superpower.

While most people on the right would happily vote for Trump right now, rather than have Biden or Harris as president, this post isn’t about Biden vs. Trump – it’s about America writ large. Partisan politics can’t save America – only the American people can do that. Waving Trump flags won’t save America and getting all invested in the partisan cult of personality politics won’t unite America or even help Americans be able to create some sense of unity in their own family or community (unless your entire family or community is totally red or totally blue).

The default reaction on the right is for the men to start reacting out of fear, blustering about “they aren’t taking my guns,” and urge people on the right to go buy more guns and ammo. President Obama was the most effective gun salesman in America.

On the left, the default reaction is to blame the bad people – Trump and/or The Deplorables. There have been plenty of prominent Dems who have tweeted out their real thoughts since 2020 and a former Clinton cabinet level official once tweeted about putting the deplorables, who refused to get the jab, in camps. The level of political rancor and partisan hatred online has been shocking at times.

It’s a tall order since we’ve all been steeped in this spin information war ecosystem for so long, but more Americans are going to have to stop thinking like partisans and start thinking like Americans. If we stand any chance of pulling our country together and weathering the crises barreling our way, we can’t let our country split into raging factions and become ungovernable.

I first wrote about the spin information war in 1998 on the Excite message boards and explained how it worked – and a whole lot of effort went into silencing me. I started this blog many years after that, in 2012. My goal has always been to defeat the spin information war, expose wholesale public corruption, and work to unite Americans into believing in One American Team again. That remains my goal.

The photo at the top is of a notebook I started in my early teens – collecting quotations. I still have that notebook and in my next post I want to write about how that notebook came about and more importantly about how destructive the Us vs. Them way of thinking is. America is about the potential of individuals and we need to start thinking about getting to know individuals and not trying to stick people in partisan boxes. Freeing ourselves of the partisan blinders can help free us of the power of the spin information war to control us. The spin information war (on both sides) is about controlling, not only the media narratives, it’s about controlling public opinion by pitting factions against each other.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics

June 14, 2022 · 10:34 am

A short update to my last post

This morning I added this paragraph to my last post, because I wasn’t sure the point about leadership I was trying to make was clear:

“Each person trying hard to prepare, help others, and sharing useful preparedness information can be a leader too. We all can step forward and try to help and guide those who have no idea how to go about working on emergency preparedness.”

I’m very much a contrarian, not good at “going along to get along’ and I can ruffle people’s feathers a lot, so I’m often left thinking, later, like with my after-rant post the other day, “Perhaps, I could have toned that down or chosen my words better or explained what I meant better.” However there are dozens upon dozens of people, especially online who are great at public speaking, great at putting together interesting and useful how-to videos and conveying information and yes, there are people all over America, in every community like this. Each of those people could choose to be a leader (many already are doing just that) in helping maintain calm, order and help others learn how to be better prepared and learn important skills. These people could be leaders and small beacons of hope, within their own family, community and even online as this economic and food crisis worsens.

The truth though is everyone at some point has a leadership role in life, like every parent has a duty to teach, guide and lead within their family. When I mention my late husband, I’m not trying to make him sound perfect, only trying to share useful leadership skills he taught me, even though I prefer not to be the leader in a group. In fact, I have always preferred to work in small groups with people committed to the same mission or goal that I am committed to. I like working with like-minded people who get stuff done and I get very frustrated and impatient with lazy people on the team I’m on, people who brag constantly and produce little, or the person who creates unnecessary drama and conflict within the group. I hate “drama” and therefore, this is the truth, I have always preferred to work in a group of men rather than in groups of women (boy, that’s a controversial thing to say, but that’s how I feel). That said, nowadays with all the gender stuff that’s gone on for years, I’ve noticed so many young men who are into being drama queens too and plenty of young women, who have to wear the pants in their family, because they’re raising kids alone or have some deadbeat man in their life, so there is that.

Let’s just leave it at, I prefer to set a goal and then focus on getting it done. We can all work towards being more productive and more proactive in our lives, rather than waiting for someone else to do for us. All that “the sky is falling” drama that spreads like wildfire on social media isn’t going to help anyone – we need more people who can stay calm, offer practical and actionable information, and who can spread a bit of hope.

There’s lots of bad news and more bad things happening than I can keep track of with this growing global economic and food crisis and that’s the important thing to remember – it is global. No country can escape all the fall-out from these crises, even America. There’s also fall-out from the war in Ukraine and climate issues, like drought affecting this crisis. Of course, I’d argue President Biden’s actions in regards to fossil fuel are making things much worse, but truly there is no magic bullet – everyone in the world is going to be impacted. Wasting a lot of energy every day looking for a scapegoat for all the serious problems is a waste of time. Each of us can look around our homes or in the mirror and see a whole lot of areas for improvement. I like to put my energy toward changing the things I can control.

People already working on homesteading, emergency preparedness and frugal-living are already taking big steps toward being more self-reliant and they’ve got important lessons they’ve learned that they can share with others. There will be disagreements about which way to do this or that is the best way, but at this point taking any steps toward growing some of your own food, learning more skills, working on stocking up food and emergency supplies, building some community spirit is better than doing nothing.

Most of all we should all live in today, not in fear of some future catastrophes. The little daily joys are what life’s all about.

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Filed under Emergency Preparedness, General Interest

June 12, 2022 · 3:43 pm

We can all offer helping hands across America

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The whole point with my 2015 blog post and this blog post is that there are a lot of alarmingly bad things happening now, even more than in 2015. I expect it to get much worse, as rabid partisans move into high-gear to create more havoc, coupled with the worldwide economic and food shortage crises roiling along. We can add in the self-inflicted disasters due to the fossil fuel situation that President Biden has decided the pain inflicted on Americans to push the green dreams is more important than millions of American jobs and the American economy taking a faceplant.

I remember how disturbed I was in 2020 with the civil unrest and how shamelessly political power grabs and efforts to infringe upon Americans’ individual liberties swept through, by conning us during the pandemic, with slogans – it’s only X-amount of days… just until this, that or the other happens with the “spread.” For the first couple weeks, I was Miss Compliant Citizen, because I wanted everyone safe and feared millions of people dying, but quickly I began watching which groups of people’s movements were targeted and which politicians rushed in with power grabs and pushing mindless rules and restrictions, all in the name of “public health.” Everything was political and my little issues with face masks the other day, with having to go to the doctor and get my medicine, frankly, piss me off a whole lot. I am reliant on the medical system, so I am forced to obey mindless rules and that makes me a little angry at myself every time I go along to get along with something I think is pointless and more about politics than science.

With the economic crises headed our way, a serious global food crisis projected, and promised political theater mayhem, with radical Dem activists promising a Summer of Rage, it’s going to be easy to get sidetracked or let fear and panic take hold. For years, I’ve thought if only there were more people on the right, who would not take the bait and react in fear and hysteria, but instead took the reins of all the things they can control in their own lives and working with others. I’ve hoped they would learn to basically give a middle finger to the political spin information war blazing across American media, that’s used to whip up fear, panic, rage on both sides of the political aisle, all to control us. What if there were millions of Americans who decided to work together with their friends, families, other like-minded people across America and said, “We aren’t going to let you destroy our great country and we are going to work together to keep ourselves, our families and communities safe and fed, and we’re going to work together peacefully – no matter what the partisan lunatics (and crooks) on either side do.”

Too many people believe that some man on a white horse is going to “save America” and that’s never been true. Trump isn’t going to save America anymore than some Democrat is going to save America. There isn’t some federal government master plan that’s going to save America, although, yes, some federal policies could mitigate some of the impact of these crises headed our way. Only we, the American people, can save our country and that means getting as many Americans as we can putting in their oars and rowing to help ourselves, our families and each other. It sounds daunting and impossible, but I believe all things are possible with faith, a whole lot of elbow grease, and teamwork.

Wearing a red hat or wrapping yourself in rainbow banners won’t help feed a single hungry child or help an elderly person in need. Stupid political slogans, getting angry, marches, protests and rallies won’t save America. Working together and doing things that really matter will. Yesterday on Twitter a Dem strategist tweeted that Dems need to keep repeating “they’re trying to destroy our democracy,” no matter what Republicans and conservatives say – this is the level of mindlessness to the spin information war. And if you think it’s only on the left, Trump mastered this same spin game with his stupid spin too, running his rally sideshow, where he went through his schtick repeating lame slogans that incite people.

Years ago when I worked at Walmart, I was the department manager of Fabrics and Crafts and loved that, but management asked me to move to the OTC Pharmacy, where they needed a department manager, then after that they asked me to move to lawn and garden and run lawn and garden. Lawn and garden was much larger and that was my first experience supervising men, because it was only women in fabrics and crafts and the OTC pharmacy. There were some personality clashes between associates in that department and also it was more associates than I had supervised before.

My husband was very good at leading soldiers in the Army. He had strong leadership skills and he knew how to get things done. I asked him what to do, because I felt like things weren’t getting done in lawn and garden and I was struggling to get associates to complete tasks and to work together. I asked him for advice. He told me to get to know my people – their strengths and weaknesses, but also to know about their lives. You have to care about the people you’re entrusted to lead. He also told me to work on being fair and consistent. And he told me the only way to fix some of the problems I told him about was demanding accountability from everyone on the team and that includes yourself. If you’re a principled leader, you have to hold yourself accountable every single day. He told me I needed to decide if I was going to lead or not.

There are plenty of good and decent people in America who still have principles, who still believe in working hard, who still believe in trying to be self-reliant and most of all who still believe in America. We can work together as One American Team, if we make up our minds and just start doing it. Start with your own family and friends, then draw your circle a little bigger and before you know it we can be reaching helping hands across America and networking.

Each person trying hard to prepare, help others, and sharing useful preparedness information can be a leader too. We all can step forward and try to help and guide those who have no idea how to go about working on emergency preparedness.

It doesn’t require some massive written plan or infrastructure or formal organizational structure – it can be just people talking, sharing ideas, information, inspiration and a little bit of help here and a helping hand there. We can all offer a helping hand to someone, whether it’s in our own family, in our group of friends, at our church, in our community, helping an elderly neighbor or a young mother struggling, and the list goes on.

Seeds of hope are like dandelions. All it takes is a small gust of wind and they can spread far and wide.

We don’t need to wait on Washington or any politician to save us. We have the power to work on saving ourselves.

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Filed under American Character, Food for Thought, General Interest

June 12, 2022 · 1:57 am

A repost of a 2015 blog post

If we build it; we can fix it

I want to write this post, which assuredly most people will dismiss out of hand.  This is my explanation of why I think Peace is possible and the fall of civilizations remedied.  I’ve been an adherent of a “God does not give us impossible missions belief” my entire life.  I believe God gave us FREE WILL.  We can choose to do or not to do, to soar or to sit on our butts whining that life isn’t fair and wait for others to do for us.  We can choose to live in FEAR or we can dare to stand up and say, “I don’t care if that’s the way it’s always been, I am going to think for myself and see if I can think, invent, build something better.”

As far as I can tell, the only human unit that is vital is the husband/wife combo, because without them reproducing , the human race will perish.  For a child to survive, requires both the mother and father.  Of course, living in groups – the “it takes a village” idea, definitely makes it much easier for humans to flourish. So, most people live in groups.

I like to analyze systems, even though I have had no formal training to do this.  One of my sons works for a large aircraft manufacturer as a software engineer.  He tells me about his travels to go diagnose and fix problems for customers, whose planes have something not working right.

Now, imagine if their planes had some fatal flaw where, say, inexplicably their most popular deluxe model of planes started suffering engine failure after hitting around the 20,000 mile mark.  The company would not accept the 20,000 mile failure of their planes nor would they want to have to rebuild engines, over and over or replace the ones that died.  They would send someone to do a systems analysis and try to detect what design flaws or equipment failure are leading to this problem.

I never accepted either the “belief” that civilizations are doomed to this endless “rise and fall” cycle, nor do I wander off into utopian pipe dreams.  My observation is that civilizations are built and deconstructed by man, just like planes – they are a man-made invention.  We find on earth some societies that remained content to settle for living in small groups and fighting to survive at bare subsistence level.  Others seek to live in a fancier deluxe model grouping, thus the most advanced civilizations are built to please those customers.  These deluxe model civilizations rely on several complex sub-systems to operate.

My mother used to get frustrated with my unwillingness to accept answers that began with, “that’s the way it’s always been”.   Accepting that premise dooms us to wasting a lot of, not only material wealth, but more importantly human lives and potential (often large portions of an entire generation), because lots of people perish when we have multiple sub-set systems failures.

So, far we’ve got most of the best geopolitical systems analysts (world leaders, scholars, statesmen, soldiers) not working on finding ways to fix the multiple, simultaneous, sub-system failures that lead to a collapse of a civilization.  They study the various sub-set systems and do some disparate diagnostics, then shrug and say, that’s just how civilizations are – “they rise and they fall”. Some try to design quick-fix patches.  Some recoil in fear and are content to be passive spectators to the collapse and murmur, “It’s always been that way”.  Brilliant geopolitics experts, almost to a man, say “that’s the way it’s always been  and I have seen nothing in history to indicate  it can ever change.” Of course, if you accept it can’t change, very few people will even bother trying to change it.

In fact, they invariably insist that when one of those sub-set systems, one intended to safeguard the entire system,  runs amok and helps destroy most of the frame and body of the entire civilization, we’re just supposed  to accept that these most complex advanced civilizations have some fatal flaw – it’s either that’s how God made the world, accept it, quit being a daydreamer and shut up about “utopias”.

I refuse to accept that belief.   I believe that if we build it, we can always improve on the design and come up with better sub-systems to build a newer, better performing model.   If your best systems analysts don’t ever even really try to find the design flaws and fix them, but instead wander off, halfheartedly fixing, only bits and pieces of some of the sub-system design flaws, of course the system will continue to reach the point where these sub-systems start falling apart and down the chute into the dustbin of history goes all that work that went into it. In the process usually many, many people perish, because most of these sub-set failures happen in midair, resulting in spectacular crashes, although some do implode and burn slowly on the runway too, so to speak.  Cleaning up the wreckage from civilizational collapses can take centuries, sometimes those people that survive don’t even bother, they wander off into the wilderness.

The known history of man provides us a great deal of information to study the various sub-sets, how they work together, which models work better and the flaws in the various systems.   For instance, we know that in governmental systems there are good kings and bad kings, dependent on one thing – the king.   For that system to work long term, relies on the accident of birth and hoping the genetic lottery of life works favorably for your kingdom, because all it takes to wreck a good kingdom is one bad king.

Others, say, in America, sat down and studied history and analyzed government systems throughout history and tried to select components that would provide a safeguard against the one bad king, as they had just got done ditching one of those bad draws in the genetic pool kind of kings.  In America, some men gathered together and said, even though no one in the known history of man has tried this first, we are FREE to come up with a better system.  We started with the premise that ALL MEN ARE FREE and constructed a governmental system that we thought would best safeguard individual freedom.  Many people in the world get sick of hearing Americans blabber on about our Constitution.  Lots of countries have constitutions, but none of them starts with the bedrock BELIEFS that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL and ALL MEN ARE FREE.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to transplant democracy, but democracy isn’t what leads to a better life for people;  FREEDOM does.  A Constitution is just a piece of paper.  Napoleon was one of the world’s premiere constitution writers in history.   As soon as Napoleon conquered a place, he wrote another constitution for those conquered people to obey.   Selecting a good governmental system, in my opinion, is the most important sub-system in a group’s organizational structure, because that sub-system determines how well any other component sub-systems you design will work.  We shouldn’t be telling the world that democracy makes us different, we should teach the world that the BELIEF IN INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM  does.

Many other governmental systems work, and all governments are subject to engine failure (where America is at now) and a host of other sub-system failures, because any government relies on many other complex sub-systems to work too, just as civilizations do.  Being willing to do the diagnostics and taking the corrective actions to prevent a total breakdown determines the fate of more complex groups, who rely on a more advanced organizational structure than a simple group, like a tribe or religious commune.

My son recently lamented to me that he doesn’t understand why some, way more experienced, software engineers he knows settle for creating sort of patches to fix problems, instead of trying to figure out what’s causing the problem to occur in the first place and fix that.  He asked why people are like that and I told him, that in my opinion, lots of people prefer to take the easiest road – believe me, growing up in PA, our pothole-patched roads attest to that.  Because throwing a patch on is easier than repairing the entire road.  And I should know, because my father built roads for a living.

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Filed under Food for Thought, General Interest, Politics

June 12, 2022 · 1:51 am

Collapse of the system, you say

I haven’t felt well today, so I’ve sat on the computer too much, instead of getting work done around my house. I’ve been thinking a lot as I read more news than I’ve done in a while and checked in on Twitter and YouTube, browsing around. What I’ve been thinking about is something I’ve been thinking about for over 20 years and it’s also something I’ve written about a whole lot on this blog. If you cringed and thought, “Oh, no, she’s going to ramble on about about the spin information war again,” you guessed wrong. What I’ve been thinking about is bigger than that and it’s more about how can we (meaning the American people) prevent a total collapse of the system, which is comprised of several major systems, when our leaders are making epically bad decisions that will lead to mayhem and disaster?

For decades I’ve read and listened to a whole lot of right-wing thinkers, pundits and read a lot about political issues in America (along with a lot of other topics – I just have always read a lot). I have also read a lot of stuff and listened to a lot of progressives, Democrats and other thought leaders on the left.

Being a right-winger myself, I used to buy into many of the “buzzword” fearmongering that fuels the right-wing political sphere and this “collapsing the system” idea is one of those phrases that Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits have harped on (and hyped for ratings) for years Since it sure looks to me we likely are heading full-speed ahead toward a collapse of several vital systems, I was thinking about a blog post I wrote back in 2015: If we build it; we can fix it

The left-wing ideologies (and their strategies) invariably have serious glaring gaps in them – their ways and means in their strategic thinking and planning never result in their pie-in-the-sky ends. For some reason people on the right have this fear of leftist ideology, as if it’s omnipotent and that there are mastermind strategists plotting all of this stuff, when in reality, I believe the thought leaders and rich and powerful among the left are glaringly lacking in sound strategic thinking and planning – your ways and means should work to achieve your ends. Unfortunately, the leftist pipedreams aren’t attainable, because they defy human nature and more importantly their ways and means lead only to misery and suffering for millions of people – and mayhem (“defund the police,” anyone.)

The most important thing is for people not to give up on America or believe that we’re doomed, because truly that will seal our fate. I believe we have enough smart, honorable, decent, hard-working people still left in America, that we don’t have to accept defeat or cower in fear. Things could get very bad, but what I wrote in 2015 is true – we shouldn’t quit before trying to do every last thing we can to save our republic. As long as we are free, we can work together in small groups to help each other, we can network with others across America and share information, advice and lend a helping hand, where we can.

We don’t have to be sitting ducks while our corrupt and clueless leaders fail to act. It’s going to take millions of Americans working hard to pull our country together, while the elites (not only on the left, there are plenty on the right too) flounder about, try to spin away the growing chaos, point fingers at each other and lie, lie, lie.

It’s going to take a whole lot of grassroots effort – not wasting time on political rallies or marches or bs like that, but actually working to find real help for people – trying to help source vital goods, trying to keep Americans fed, trying to keep Americans finding positive solutions, to keep America up and running.

The last thing we need is a lot of flame-throwing and raging fools – there are enough of those in Washington and the media. We are going to have to work together and pull as many like-minded people together toward, not just pointing out all of the problems and shortages, but on finding ways to locally help each other, then expanding it to working on networking with other Americans across the country. We need to stay focused on solutions – not fear, panic, worrying and worst of all we can’t let defeatism take hold of one iota of our spirit. Letting defeatism into your mind is fatal.

Politicians only dream up expensive government programs that don’t work. To get through what’s headed our way, I think it’s going to take all of us to start working on self-empowerment. Work to take care of yourself and your own family, then, if you can, try to start helping others, rather than sitting around bitching about Biden and our feckless leaders in Washington.

These are my thoughts.

I’m going to repost that 2015 blog post.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics

June 11, 2022 · 11:51 am

The new normal is a blast…

Okay, this is political, but this lady’s tweet is spot on for where we’re at. First it was a baby formula shortage that Biden used the Defense Authorization Act to fly in baby formula from Europe… now there’s a tampon shortage. One can only wonder how the Biden administration will handle this shortage…

Here’s a true story from this week. I got sick a few days ago. When I arrived at my doctor’s office, I realized I didn’t have any face masks in my car or purse. So, I called my doctor’s office and was put on hold, as I drove to a nearby CVS to buy a face mask. When the receptionist finally answered my call, I explained what happened and told her I would be a few minutes late. My primary care doctor prescribed antibiotics. I get my prescriptions filled on a nearby military post, where the Refill Pharmacy is located on one side of the snack bar and not at the military hospital pharmacy. Prescriptions from off-post doctors go through the Refill Pharmacy – that’s been a shuffling around over the years too with military retirees and their families – using on-post military doctors, then they wanted us to use civilian primary care providers, then it was some care went back to military providers.

That refill pharmacy went through several procedures since 2020, even going to setting up some makeshift drive-through pharmacy operation in the parking lot, which was chaotic. I felt sorry for the soldiers having to run in and out the building in the summertime heat, to handle each prescription. When they went back to allowing people to go inside to get their prescriptions, it’s been a face mask required location, even though it’s located in the snack bar, where soldiers and their families sit mask-free and eat. The refill pharmacy has also had socially-distanced seating in their corner of the snack bar until recently, but the mandatory face mask rule is still in place.

The pharmacists pull down their masks frequently and all along I’ve wondered why they’re doing all of this face mask drama in an open snack bar, where other people aren’t wearing masks. It’s all bureaucratic bs. at this point.

Unfortunately, so many people, especially medical people and military top brass, will cling to this ridiculous Covid theater for the foreseeable future. I remember how long they kept in place all sorts of pointless post 9/11 security measures, that made no sense whatsoever, especially at airports and on military installations. Anyone expecting the federal government to solve anything is delusional, I think.

The elastic ear loop of my disposable mask tore as I was walking toward the refill pharmacy and I was standing there tying the elastic around a corner of the flimsy mask, hoping it would hold long enough for me to get my prescription filled.

As I waited the lady in the Panda Express kept apologizing to customers, telling them she was sorry, but they were closing at 2:30 pm, because there were only two of them working and she said they would be closing at 2:30 for the next few days. That’s what life is like – endless, stupid, mindless rules and nothing operates like it used to.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics

June 11, 2022 · 9:14 am

A thoughtful video from a homesteader

No rants or politics today. Here’s a very thoughtful and upbeat video on self-sufficiency by Heidi at Rain Country:

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Filed under General Interest

June 10, 2022 · 9:53 pm

Some after-rant thoughts

As usual after a rant, I think I should have clarified a bit more. I am not trying to diss the preppers who are giving constant shortage updates or videos of empty shelves, it’s just that for this type of effort to be effective at providing useful information requires a more organized local networking effort with it, I think. The one guy, who is doing “boots on the ground” reports is getting bombarded with emails, videos and information, that will be unsustainable on a larger volume level or a long-term effort. This is exactly what happens whenever the federal government tries to start some national hotline response. It’s the problem of few people at the national level trying to respond to thousands of people and provide them localized and personalized information. There are almost always noble intentions, but it becomes unsustainable at a national level or if it’s one person trying to sift through a massive amount of information that he or she is receiving.

I get it that many people on the right are defensive and still trying to prove there are really shortages and that inflation is a serious problem, when the White House is still lying about the economic disaster. Here’s a Fox News report with Bret Baier citing that Americans are paying $460 more a month than a year ago for goods and services:

This type of “boots on the ground” shortage information is something that can change within hours as stores receive and unload trucks or stock shelves and while the major grocery chain in-stock computer systems with their online shopping are riddled with problems, it’s still more reliable than random people reporting shortage problems at stores or video of empty shelves that someone sent in. That information becomes dated quickly.

Even the facebook local efforts and community bulletin board stuff I’ve seen often gets to be too much unverified information and comments to sift through. I can usually find the information I need faster just doing some searching on my own or making a few phone calls rather than reading through hundreds of comments.

This overload happens in all sorts of information-gathering and information-distribution efforts, in all sorts of organizations and situations and it often requires some filtering and verification processes to get to verifiable, useable and actionable information.

I didn’t intend to bash the guy trying to help share information. Oddly enough, I’ve put a lot of thought into this information “void” situation pondering when the spin information war finally reaches critical mass for at least the past 15 years and I’ve read a lot of stuff about information warfare, information operations and all sorts of topics pertaining to national emergencies.

Unfortunately, I think we’re close to that critical mass point with the information “void.” One of my main concerns was wondering how will it be possible to unite enough Americans and keep them working together in a crisis where all the information systems people rely on – the news, social media, elected leaders, our institutions are thoroughly corrupted and people don’t know who or what information they can trust and millions of Americans are conditioned to “reacting” instantly to things they see or hear on social media and flying into hysterical reactions. We are very close to this crisis point, as we’re facing an epic economic and food shortage crisis barreling toward us.

Along with a catastrophic economic crisis headed our way, this information “void” problem could leave us unable to unite and work together on anything. That’s been something I’ve thought about for years, long before Trump, red hats, Biden’s America, the pandemic or this economic crisis.

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Filed under Emergency Preparedness, General Interest, Information War

June 10, 2022 · 3:59 pm

Without comment

WaPo economic columnist:

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June 10, 2022 · 2:22 pm

A sensible food shortage prepper list

Here’s a short video by Sensible Prepper with 15 things you can do to prepare for food shortages:

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