Here’s Trump’s plan to stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours:
I expect Trump’s spinners or Trump himself to change this or pretend Trump never said this, but Trump’s 24-hour plan assumes Trump’s so great at negotiating that Zelensky will make concessions and Putin’s going to fold, all because of the threat of arming Ukraine with more US weapons…
That’s the Trump plan – send Ukraine even more weapons than Biden has.
Filed under Uncategorized
There’s a whole lot of historical ignorance among the Trump-right mouthpieces, who spout Putin-apologist takes. Here’s one of the most ignorant takes I’ve ever seen:
Trump unabashedly gushes over the strongmen thug type leaders in the world and has done this long before he got into politics. And Gaetz, being a Trump mouthpiece, set up a ridiculous, historically false strawman argument that I’ve heard various Trump pundit/mouthpieces assert. The argument goes that China is the real threat and Russia isn’t the problem – Ukraine is. Some variations on this Trumper crowd anti-Ukraine stance assert that by backing Ukraine, we’re pushing Russia and China closer together.
It helps to read some history, which seems something that Trump’s cadre of Congressional sycophants obviously haven’t done. The Trump Republican Party now sells selective rules they choose to follow and their own selective patriotic norms. There’s now an antiwar right, so self-absorbed and enmeshed in partisan politics that they no longer care about America writ large, unless it coincides with their own partisan political views. They refuse to accept that Biden won the election and are really no different than the #Resist Dems, who refused to accept Trump’s win in 2016 and refused to accept him as a legitimate president.
Let’s look at some history, starting with Soviet Russia post WWII, where Stalin rolled over Eastern Europe and seized control of what later became known as the Eastern bloc. Here’s an explanation from Britannica:
“The Eastern bloc originated at the end of World War II. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pledged to hold free and fair democratic elections in eastern European countries that the Red Army had liberated. Rather than carrying out this promise, occupying Soviet forces supported takeovers by local communist parties and the restructuring of eastern European governments and economies according to the Stalinist model. The U.S.S.R. also facilitated the rise to power of former communist partisans in Albania and Yugoslavia, who quickly allied themselves with the Soviet Union.”
Trump and his segment of the right-wing media punditry have taken the position that Putin is the good guy, Ukraine is the bad guy and NATO is a force for evil in the world, that the US should abandon, even though the US was instrumental in the formation of NATO as a long-term investment in Western security, post WWII. We were purchasing long-term security insurance, not only for our European allies, but for ourselves too. NATO allowed America to grow and prosper and most of all it insured our vast American economic interests too. We benefited mightily from maintaining the NATO alliance. The Americans trashing NATO assuredly won’t like a world where the Russia/China alliance calls the shots in the world and we’re forced to grovel and appease them.
I saw the iron curtain in person and I served in West Germany during the Cold War era. The Soviet threat was real. I was also back in West Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed, the wall came down and Germany reunified. I believe firmly that NATO has been a net positive for American national security and worth the investment.
Next let’s move on to Gaetz setting up the strawman that China is the real bad guy and we’d be better allowing Putin’s Russia into NATO. First, it’s completely idiotic to suggest letting Russia into NATO, since NATO was started to check Soviet Russian aggression – the kind like we’ve just seen with Putin launching a full-scale invasion into Ukraine. Putin’s Russia has been actively working to destabilize Moldova too – same Russian blueprint for how the Eastern bloc came into being post WWII. Again the reason NATO was formed in the first place was to check Russian aggression.
Binary-thinking and arguments are what Trump lives and breathes. You’re either for him or against him. Every situation in Trump world pits Trump-followers on one side (the only good people) vs. the bad people. The political arguments Trump and his crowd of loyalists spread are in that same simplistic vein. A Republican can go from being great in Trump world, but the minute they get on Trump’s bad side, well, then they are cast out and a RINO or worse. Their reasoning is as wacky as the far-left, where you either jump on board their latest culture war push, use the new words they come up with, or you’re banished from the tribe.
Gaetz mentioned China’s military activities in Cuba as a rationale for China is a threat, not Russia. That’s ludicrous on its face. Russia and communist China’s close ties are long-standing, so nothing we do is going to push Russia and China closer together – they’ve been close allies since post WWII, when Mao led the Chinese Communist Revolution. Mao turned to Stalin for training, funds and arms to launch the Chinese Communist Revolution, after the Japanese were driven out of China. The US had some military advisors and troops in China, Burma, India during WWII. We helped the Chinese fight the Japanese. Imperialist Japan had invaded China in the 1930s:
“Conflict in Asia began well before the official start of World War II. Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace. In 1939, the armies of Japan and the Soviet Union clashed in the area of the Khalkin Gol river in Manchuria. This battle lasted four months and resulted in a significant defeat for the Japanese.” – https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/presidential-inquiries/invasion-manchuria
The US decided not to do much to aid the nationalist Chinese government to counter Mao’s revolution, while the Soviets were advising and arming Mao’s forces. After the communist takeover of China, the Soviets, over time, sent all sorts of advisors, assistance and support to China. There have been some rocky patches in Sino-Soviet relations over the years, but they remain close allies – regardless what we do and regardless what happens in Ukraine.
Gaetz mentioned China’s military activities in Cuba as a rationale for why China is a threat, not Russia. That’s also ludicrous on its face. The Russians have been in Cuba for decades too. The Russians operated the Lourdes SIGINT station in Cuba spying on the US. That station was shutdown in 2002, but in 2014, well, here’s a Business Insider report, Russia Is Reportedly Reopening Its Spy Base In Cuba :
“Russia and Cuba have agreed to reopen the signals intelligence (SIGINT) base in Lourdes, Cuba, which was primarily used to spy on the U.S., Russian business daily Kommersant reports.”
So, if Gaetz is so concerned about China in Cuba how does he feel about continuing Russian spy operations against the US in Cuba, which are obviously being coordinated with Russia’s close ally – CHINA. Gaetz and the entire Trump cadre of spin clowns should do some studying WWII and the Cold War, because this pacifist, apologist kind of idiocy just emboldens both China and Russia.
Russia and China have been close allies for decades and they will work together to undermine and damage America and American interests wherever they can. Again, we aren’t pushing Russia and China closer together – they have been working closely to undermine Western interests since the end of WWII.
It’s fine if you don’t want the US supporting Ukraine, but such ahistorical tripe as Gaetz peddled here left me feeling sad for the state of American education and leadership. A sitting US Congressman peddling allowing Russia into NATO dishonors all the Americans who stood firm and sacrificed so much during WWII and the Cold War to keep the Western world free.
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Politics
This is just a small object lesson on preparedness. Yesterday when I got up the water in my bathroom sink came out in a trickle, so I went to my kitchen sink and turned the water on there. Same thing with just a trickle of water and low water pressure. Next I went outside to check that there wasn’t a leak in the pipes coming into my house. Everything looked normal.
After 9 am, I decided to call my local water department, as I’m on municipal water, and the lady told me there was a water main break and they were working on that. Later, the water pressure returned to normal, but then came the announcement of a boil water advisory until the water department completes testing of the water. Here’s the quote:
“The advisory is being issued out of an abundance of caution – there is
the potential a health hazard may exist due to microbial contamination in these areas without positive pressure.”
Once again it’s been driven home to me that having emergency drinking water stored is important. I didn’t have to run to the store or alter my daily routine, because I have drinking water stored and a Berkey water filter. I have lifestraws and other water purification means too.
I certainly wasn’t expecting a water main break near me when I woke up yesterday, but having bottled water and other water purification options on-hand was a relief. You never know when some type of incident or emergency will happen, so even small preparedness efforts can bring peace of mind when something out of the ordinary does happen. And the thing is all sorts of things out of our control can happen to create problems. Just a small bit of preparedness effort can mitigate a whole lot of inconvenience and worries.
Filed under Emergency Preparedness, General Interest
This is going to be a politics post about the 2024 election – fair warning. While I don’t feel like doing the usual right-wing rant about Hunter Biden’s laptop and his fortune acquired through influence-peddling off of his father’s high government position as vice president, this post is about Hunter Biden and the larger 2024 Democrat political drama playing out.
Upfront, I have serious doubts Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. When the mainstream liberal media start hyping news stories about Biden’s fitness for office, that’s a clear indication the liberal media has gotten those talking points from high up in the Democratic Party machine. Otherwise, they’d still be running happy “What flavor ice cream cone did you order, Mr. President?” drivel. Today Axios has a story, Old yeller: Biden’s private fury, about Joe Biden’s “temperament,” with a section about, “Zoom out: Biden’s temper comes in the form of angry interrogations rather than erratic tantrums.”
The knives are out within some high-level of the Democratic Party to pressure Joe Biden to step aside, but don’t expect Biden to go easily or without putting up a fight. And that brings us to Hunter Biden.
When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October of 2020, weeks before the election, the mainstream liberal media and a lot of influential, former, high-level government intelligence officials closed ranks and declared the story was Russian disinformation. Several social media tech giants blocked the NY Post laptop story from their sites and since that time a lot of liberal media effort has gone into doing damage control for Hunter Biden – until recently.
There have been a flurry of stories by liberal news organizations, acknowledging Hunter Biden’s pay-to-play activities, his drug use and the authenticity of the laptop from hell. However, this more candid reporting comes after the fact, so to speak,. Here’s a June 23, 2023 CNBC story: Hunter Biden to plead guilty to federal tax crimes, take deal on gun charge.
The latest Axios, Old yeller hit piece comes after last week’s, Biden White House whodunit – with the baggie of cocaine found in the WH library, nope, in a “heavily traveled” part of the West Wing, to then in a not so “heavily traveled” part of the White House and so it goes. Rest assured the White House spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, the worst WH press secretary in my memory, was quick to lambast anyone for suggesting the cocaine might belong to Hunter Biden, a known cocaine addict.
My initial suspicion was wondering if the cocaine had been planted there by some Dem, in hopes of creating another embarrassment for the President and to inch up the pressure for him to step aside.
Even The Atlantic ran a op-ed a few days ago: Step Aside, Joe Biden.
And here’s where Hunter Biden comes in, because Hunter Biden had been living secluded in a Malibu mansion with the Secret Service paying a fortune to rent a home in Malibu to protect him and his family, we were told. Here’s a People magazine article from April 8, 2022: Secret Service Agents Protecting Hunter Biden Have to Rent $30,000-a-Month Malibu Home: Report.
Alas, in recent months Hunter Biden left his cushy Malibu mansion and has become Joe Biden’s shadow… stage managing Biden’s public appearances and I presume to keep tabs on the White House, to protect his father’s and family’s interests. So, here’s a July 4, 2023 Newsweek article: Does Hunter Biden Live at the White House? What We Know.
The one thing that should not be underestimated about Hunter Biden, is he’s a lot like Jeffrey Epstein, in that he has connections everywhere in Washington – among Dems and Republicans, among lobbyists, among foreign operators, and he knows where a lot of bodies are buried in Washington. Hunter Biden isn’t going to let his father be pushed out to pasture easily and that’s the drama I think is playing out at the highest levels of the Democratic Party right now – some powerful Dems want Joe Biden to step aside soon and Hunter is there to thwart them.
Note: Just saw this FOX News report: Obama-era emails reveal Hunter’s extensive ties to nearly a dozen senior-level Biden admin aides
Filed under General Interest, Politics
Real life has gotten in the way of my good intentions to write blog posts lately. I took an out-of-state trip at the end of May and got sick with a sinus infection and upper respiratory infection. So, after an antibiotic I thought I was over that, but then a different infection took hold and I went through lab tests and two more rounds of two different antibiotics for that. Finally, got past that and now I’m back to having another bout of some sinus/upper respiratory mess again. I haven’t gone to my doctor yet, as I just finished the third antibiotic last weekend and hope to avoid a fourth round of antibiotics.
So, on top of feeling poorly, on the 4th of July my home AC died and it became miserable in my house quickly, despite ceiling fans and setting up several electric fans. Luckily, I have a separate AC unit for the back porch, which we installed windows in years ago, and I now usually refer to as my sunroom. My late husband liked to sit out there to smoke, so we put in heating and air a long time ago. I had that cool room, so it wasn’t any real suffering – just another inconvenience. Yesterday morning, I had to call several AC repair services to locate one that could come that day and after replacing the capacitor in the afternoon, it was fixed. By evening my house was cooled off and life returned to normal.
A few lessons learned though – I am very dependent on AC, but so are my pets. The cats were totally out of sorts and my late husband’s dog is 16 years old and he couldn’t deal with the heat in the house at all. There was no big emergency, but with feeling poorly already, not having AC was very unpleasant. I think most people in the American South are dependent on air conditioning and would struggle if there was an extended power outage. It made me think about how fragile most of society (myself included) is to even small disruptions to our modern way of life.
With my house still cooling off, I decided to try making meatloaf in my instant pot, because I didn’t want to turn the oven on in the kitchen. I’ve been trying to experiment with using my instant pot more. I used a foil loaf pan to hold the meatloaf and set it on the wire rack in my instant pot. The meatloaf was okay – not terrific and I did turn the broiler on for few minutes to get the glaze to set. Meatloaf made in the oven is better, I think, but this instant pot method did work. I made meatloaf in my slow cooker years ago and that works too. Being willing to try new things and improvise are two habits worth cultivating.
That brings me to what’s been on my mind. Trying new things and “improvising” need some guardrails and I have a problem when people try to play God. The entire transgender movement is based on playing God, trying to chemically and surgically alter biological sex, which isn’t possible. Instead, it’s focused on surgically mutilating sex organs and chemically manipulating hormones. While I don’t believe in being mean to trans people, especially children sucked up into this destructive movement, I think the movement is a social contagion spread mostly via social media. I won’t pay lip service to beliefs and actions, I don’t believe in.
Being able to say you don’t agree with something shouldn’t be controversial in America, but there’s a whole lot of mainstream media and political pressure to make people submit to left-wing cultural ideas or you’re liable to be targeted as a dreaded MAGA extremist. Unfortunately, there’s now a whole lot of get-on-board pressure among the American right -wing political/media crowd too. You either buy into their latest hot take conspiracy theories or wacky ideas that race across the internet or you’re labeled “one of THEM.” I am an American – first, last, always.
During the pandemic, this media/political pressure took the form of ostensibly working to “protect people from COVID misinformation” and came replete with the mantra “trust the science.” Before the pandemic, I had a fair amount of trust in public health efforts and especially in vaccinations, because vaccinations have led to remarkable life-saving around the globe, especially against diseases like polio and smallpox. Yet, here I was distrusting our public health officials and doubting “the science,”as more politicians and the mainstream media started demanding we must “trust the science.”
This post isn’t about rehashing the pandemic or the trans movement, it’s pondering how we evaluate new “big ideas,” that have never been tested before. No matter where you stand on COVID vaccines, it’s indisputable that the vaccines do not stop the spread nor do they protect you from contracting the disease. And in regards to all the other pandemic “social mitigation” efforts – closing businesses, churches, schools, etc. None of those efforts had any science,
So the other day I say a Politico report: White House cautiously opens the door to study blocking sun’s rays to slow global warming. We’ve been told to embrace solar power, which relies on the sun and now some scientists are suggesting tinkering with screwing up the upper atmosphere to block sunlight, per the Politico article:
“The controversial concept known as solar radiation modification is a potentially effective response to fighting climate change, but one that could have unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, some scientists say.”
The long-term damage from trying all these untested pandemic responses, is still being studied. The long-term decimation of people’s lives from getting caught up in the trans movement extremism is only beginning to trickle out with horrifying stories of young people, who were rushed into “gender-affirming” drug therapies to “block puberty” or even to surgically remove sex organs. When I first heard about “solar radiation modification,” I thought it was fake news or someone had mistakenly bought into some dystopian sci-fi plot.
I wonder how many people would support this type of science experiment, that has the potential to cause mass starvation, even more catastrophic climate change, or even trigger an ELE, an extinction level event?
Sorry, after witnessing the politicization of science, in recent years, where absurd word and semantical games get spun up to deceive the American public and manipulate people into meekly submitting to all sorts of stupid, pointless and some very destructive actions, all sold by “trust the science,” well, that trust is broken. People who play word games about defining what a woman is should not have the power to decide to screw with our atmosphere and try to control how much sunlight we’re allowed to have to survive. The hubris to think they should be allowed to try to control the sun is mind boggling.
Trust is earned. I’m a firm, “Hell, NO!” on allowing mad scientists to use the earth and humanity as test subjects.
Note: there are other news sources that reported on the Biden administration opening the door to study blocking the sun, by screwing up the upper atmosphere, so here are a few:
FOX News – White House report signals openness to manipulating sunlight to prevent climate change
CNBC – White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
The Both Side News – To combat climate change, the White House may block sunlight
Filed under Uncategorized
Image compliments of: https://thegraphicsfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Vintage-Patriotic-Image-Sailor-Girl-GraphicsFairy.jpg
Filed under Uncategorized
Last night I watched a YouTube video by MIgardener, who has a very popular organic gardening channel. He also runs a seed business and I have ordered seeds from him. I feel what he said should be shared. He’s not a fearmonger or someone who puts out alarmist content. In this video he’s urging gardeners to plant more food now and he stated that the heavy smoke from the large number of Canadian forest fires is impacting plant growth for crops and in home gardens in a large portion of the US.
We can add this looming problem to the drought situation in parts of the country too and it’s obvious our food supply system will be challenged in coming months.
I found this article, 1816 – The Year Without Summer, and here’s the first patragraph:
“The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 triggered a change in the global climate. The heavier material fell to the ground and the ocean’s surface. However, when lighter particulates reached the stratosphere, they spread out and created an aerosol cloud the size of Australia.The cloud blocked sunlight from reaching the earth and changed the global climate by 2-7 degrees Fahrenheit, the effects of which devastated much of the world in what should have been the summer of 1816. Crops failed across Europe and the U.S. due to the cold or lack of sunshine causing grain and oat prices to soar, torrential rains flooded crops in Ireland, novel strains of cholera killed millions in India, crime became rampant, and people starved in many countries.”
There are rumors galore about the cause of these Canadian forest fires, with the far-right media ecosystem putting forth that these fires were deliberately set by the infamous “THEY,” to starve “us” to death, but I don’t have the time or energy to invest in the constant conspiracy theory hot takes.
Heck, I even saw some conspiracy theory on Twitter, after reports of NYC was dealing with heavy smoke a few weeks ago, that the Canadian forest fires aren’t real, but it’s some evil US government plot that’s creating all this smoke in the US. I believe the Canadian forest fires are real and it’s neither here nor there about what caused these Canadian forest fires. The issue is these fires are burning and the smoke situation is impacting the US in many ways, including food production. There are drought conditions and crazy weather events galore in the US this year too.
So what can we do to lessen the impact on our families?
The video above is not alarmist. He’s urging people to grow more in your garden now and to keep planting. Trying to find ways to encourage people to take steps to be prepared for more potential shortage situations and more food inflation seems common sense at this point. You don’t need to get hysterical or jump into panic mode, but even small efforts to work on building up some extra food supplies in your pantry and trying to learn to grow some vegetables and herbs are better than sitting there doing nothing.
I know plenty of people who are resistant to “prepping” and have a million and one excuses for why they don’t do things that could lessen their worries and bring them more sense of control in rapidly changing times. However, calmly urging people you care about to take steps to be able to feed their family – no matter what crisis comes our way – matters.
Since the 4th of July is right around the corner here in America, perhaps explaining that working toward personal food security really is an integral part of personal freedom might work better than warning about doom and gloom events. Every little bit you do to learn more skills and work at becoming more self-reliant really means you’re on the path to personal freedom. I’ve got some of my family agreeing with me on basic preparedness now, so I feel like that’s progress.
Filed under Emergency Preparedness, Gardening, General Interest
Do you ever hear some political or media person say something relating to history and then wonder if they really have any knowledge about the historical event or person they’re talking about? Well, recently I heard former President Trump make some garbled reference to a communist Chinese leader had to use a lot of force against his own people for the good of his country. He didn’t name the Chinese leader or give specifics though.
While I know any mention of Trump will have his supporters rushing to defend him and his detractors getting on their anti-MAGA soapbox, what I started thinking about was how little I really know about China’s history, especially post-WWII, which was what, I assume, Trump was referring to, based on previous comments Trump has made over the years, even, praising the Tiananmen Square massacre. Here’s a Trump response to a question in a 1990 Playboy interview:
“You mean firm hand as in China?
When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world—”
Trump has made comments similar to this, praising strongman leaders using excessive force, many times, long before he entered national politics. I mention Trump’s recent comment, because it prodded me to assess what I really know about China’s history.
Over the years I’ve read literally dozens of books on Russian history, Soviet history and Cold War history, but somehow beyond being fascinated by the ancient Chinese military strategy treatise, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, my knowledge of Chinese history was sadly lacking.
So, I started on a three-book series on China’s post-WWII history by Frank Dikötter. I already had his book, Mao’s Great Famine 1958-1962 (hadn’t read it though), so I purchased, The Tragedy of Liberation (1945-1957), and The Cultural Revolution (1962-1976). I’m only about a third of the way into The Tragedy of Liberation, and I’m very surprised at how many new things I’ve learned. It’s a time investment to actually sit and read books, but rather than rushing to write blog posts or throw my two cents into the instantaneous social media fever swamp of hot takes, I’m slowing down about jumping to conclusions, which seems to be opposite from the way most popular social media influencers operate.
I’d rather offer something that’s accurate, researched and where I put in some time to verify information and think about situations. I did plenty of hot take reactionary blog posts over the years and too often I relied on right-wing media or cherry-picked legacy media articles that bolstered my conclusions. Unfortunately, I think my slowing down on leaping to conclusions doesn’t fit well with the way social media and our political news operate. By the time I’m done researching and thinking about a situation, that situation will be relegated to old news and likely be long forgotten, but at least I will have learned many new things rather than investing emotional energy into social media drama.
And that brings me to the latest hot news, which wasn’t about China, but instead was back to Russia. I was following Twitter with the Wagner Group sort of coup attempt (not sure exactly what happened there) and the first thing was I saw all sorts of people, blue check accounts and anonymous ones, on Twitter posting videos ostensibly from Russia. I had no idea when or where those videos were taken, what I was actually seeing as far as military action and I had no way to verify any of it. This is exactly what happened in the Ukraine War very quickly, where both sides have been engaged in a very aggressive propaganda war.
I don’t know what’s really happening in Ukraine and I stopped reacting to the hot takes war reporting very quickly after Russia launched a full-scale invasion into Ukraine – that full-scale invasion by Russia is a fact, that for some reason a lot of the right-wing media ecosystem and very popular media personalities (like Tucker Carlson) have spent an enormous amount of time and energy obfuscating and muddying with all sorts of misdirection. Russia did launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and not losing sight of that fact is important. Putin was not the victim.
With this situation in Russia, numerous media and political people floated epic conspiracy theories linking all sorts of things together – some even asserting this Wagner Group action was a CIA operation. There’s absolutely no proof of that given – just neatly tying together a news story about a Pentagon accounting error from a few days ago with the events happening in Russia in the past couple days and stating the CIA-connection conspiracy theory as fact. Many Americans instantly latch onto these types of anti-American government/Deep State conspiracy theories and while certainly some conspiracies could be true and a few sometimes turn out to be true, without some real evidence I don’t want to race down those wild rabbit holes constantly. You can get lost in them or lose any sense of reality, if you start buying into so much craziness, devoid of solid factual foundation.
Instead of embracing all sorts of dubious conspiratorial links, I’m working on hardening my personal defenses against spin information war, because every time you surrender to emotion-driven spin, you surrender a lot of your mind to buying into other people’s deliberate lies and efforts to manipulate and control you. The people on the right selling these wild conspiracy theories are not operating in good faith any more than left-wing spinmeisters selling conspiracy theories are. That’s the truth. If your only defense is “so and so said this” and you either trust this online personality, without question, or you think because “so and so” is part of “your tribe” that means what he/she said has to be right, well, that’s not thinking – that’s groupthink behavior and I want no parts of it.
With the situation in Russia, I don’t know what exactly just happened, why it happened, or have any insight into what the larger takeaways are. And neither do 99.9% of the people I’ve seen reporting and commenting on it. I certainly have no evidence about big conspiracy theories.
I can say though that I’ve learned a lot about mass indoctrination, reading about Mao’s communist takeover of China and somehow, I think learning more about this topic might be more relevant than leading the pack on social media hot takes about events, which I have no verified information other than these hot takes are trending on Twitter and “everyone is saying,” blah, blah, blah.
There’s more than enough blah, blah, blah on social media.
Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics
My old stand-by Betty Crocker cookbook.
This is just a prepper sort of post – no politics, but assuredly I’ll be writing more about politics soon. I went to Indiana for my second oldest granddaughter’s high school graduation a few weeks ago and ended up catching some bug. After about a week and a half, with no improvement, it was time to see the doctor. With a round of antibiotics, I’m now finally over the coughing fits and sinus infection, but now I’ve got a different infection starting and will likely have to call my doctor next week. This little bout of sickness got me thinking about preparedness in several different directions.
First thing, I realized was while I have a few pets to care for, which isn’t strenuous, keeping up with watering my little container garden was a challenge. I felt weak and exhausted for over two weeks. In a real crisis situation, well, you can’t neglect your garden for a few weeks or you could end up losing most of your plants. If I had other animals to care for, I would not have been able to keep up. So, despite the main theme of buying this and that around the online emergency preparedness community, I believe preparedness has to include some thinking about how to manage when things start going wrong, which will inevitably happen, no matter how prepared you believe you are. An injury or protracted illness could really throw all your preparedness efforts into disarray. Something’s going to happen that you hadn’t considered or prepared for, because that’s just how real life is.
For a lot of people with existing health conditions, having an assortment of over-the-counter medications isn’t really an ideal solution. I did take some over-the-counter cough and cold medicine, but when I finally saw my primary care doctor, he advised me not to take any of the over-the-counter cold medications or decongestants, because of my medical problems. I assume there are a lot of older people, in this same situation where over-the-counter medications aren’t advisable with their medical conditions and/or prescription medications. My high-level of reliance on the medical system was brought home to me again. Many healthier people could also require more advanced medical care, depending on injuries or illness, so trying to stay healthy and working on fitness should be a key preparedness focus too.
Having gone further down the road on emergency preparedness, especially since 2020, being open to making adjustments and changes is part of my journey. I don’t want to pick on an online prepper guy, but as I watched a few of this one guy’s videos, he comes across like he’s got his isolated ranch all set up and is prepared for every contingency. He has all the answers. Name a type of SHTF type event and he’s got the total plan for survival at his fingertips. I watched a few of his videos and then realized I’m probably more like this guy, with my strong opinions, than unlike him sometimes – especially with his political hot takes, even though my views are different than his. I’ve seen several male prepper online experts, who are like that about self-defense too, some with military backgrounds and some with other backgrounds, but they come across to me as overly confident that they’ve got everything handled. I hope they do have all the answers or some other people do have the answers and survive even the most catastrophic crisis, because I truly want human life to continue on earth, regardless whether I survive or not. For me, the more I’ve thought about preparedness and actually worked on projects to become better prepared, well, it’s been humbling in many ways.
I’m one of those people, who doesn’t have all the answers. My preparedness efforts are full of mistakes, setbacks, having to rethink things, trying other ways to do things. Often things that sounded simple, turn out to require a lot more practice and skill than I thought they would. Watching other people do things on videos is no substitute for actually doing them yourself, so I keep working on projects myself and trying to learn more as I go. There are some successes, so that’s encouraging and it reminds me how much worse off I’d be if I hadn’t worked on preparedness at all.
After this latest bout of sickness, I also realized that I want to prepare and have more freezer meals stocked up for when I don’t feel like cooking or if something happens where I’m sick and having some quick meals, beyond soup, would be handy. During the weeks of having that crud, I ended up buying some meals in the frozen food section at the grocery store. Disappointment followed, both with the high cost of frozen meals for what you actually get and they really weren’t very good. Whenever I hear happy economic news, I feel like I’m living in some alternative reality, because I haven’t seen any sort of great drop in prices at the grocery store, beyond a few items, like egg prices have come back down. It’s still sticker shock at the register every time I go to the grocery store. My freezer dinner experience prodded some rethinking a small part of my food storage and pulling out old and not so old cookbooks to read.
As a young wife, back in the 1980s, I began making some freezer meals and referred to the Special Helps section at back of my red Betty Crocker cookbook, pictured at the top, for guidance. I’ve always frozen extra prepared food, but rarely made a concerted effort to cook with that in mind. Now, I’m going to focus on having an assortment of frozen homemade meals on hand and more easy to heat up homemade soups and stews too.
Getting some freezer meals put together is a small project and I’m not doing some massive freezer meal prep days, like I’ve seen some ladies online do, where they put together dozens of freezer meals at one time. Cooking an extra meal here or there when I’m preparing supper and then sticking one in the freezer will work just fine for me.
While it’s a good feeling to build a prepper pantry and have emergency supplies on hand, I keep trying to use my food and supplies to improve my everyday life. After all these years living with access to online recipes galore, I never thought I’d be back to browsing through my old cookbooks, but thinking about freezer meals brought me back to the 1980s when as a young wife, I was first learning how to manage my own kitchen. My mother gave me that Betty Crocker cookbook in 1980 when I got married and it’s still my favorite cookbook. It’s also still a useful reference to have in my home.
Filed under Emergency Preparedness, General Interest
While, I’d like to just move on from the pandemic, all of the drastically bad decisions shouldn’t just be ignored. Many Americans lost their jobs, their businesses and suffered extreme pain and suffering due to unscientific and untested social mitigation policies. Many Americans in hospitals and nursing homes died without their families by their side or were not allowed to have funerals in some cases or had strict restrictions on funeral services. In the end, none of these policies worked.
I don’t believe that trying to criminally prosecute individual people, like there’s a cry on the right about Dr. Fauci, especially from Trump-supporters, will ever happen. The truth is Dr. Fauci was given all that power by President Trump and the buck really does stop there. However, from everything I’ve seen with Trump supporters over the years, they absolve Trump of all blame for anything and make up excuses for his bad decisions. So, if Trump ends up being the 2024 GOP nominee and were to be elected again, I doubt he’d want to be in the position of pushing for accountability for the COVID policies that he authorized during his first term. Just last week Trump was praising Andrew Cuomo for doing a better job on COVID than Ron DeSantis in Florida. Trump later came out with some garbled walk-back that he was only talking about numbers of deaths. This little volley of comments looks to me like a good indicator, Trump would likely try to brush aside any rehashing of pandemic failures. Trump gave Fauci a commendation medal on his last day in office.
Biden ran in 2020 on being the COVID Preacher (Enforcer), so he certainly wouldn’t want to hold anyone accountable or even admit they made mistakes.
DeSantis is promising to stand up against the left’s culture war, but it’s too early to tell if he can defeat Trump in the primary.
What happened during COVID with the Dems “Trust the Science” effort was really the political left working to use the pandemic to gain more control and power over people.
I still get angry when I think about all the unnecessary suffering these “experts” caused during the pandemic and while this Mean Girl doctor, who might be the next CDC director, brought all those feelings to bear, mostly what I think about is how I trusted Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and these other “experts” in the very beginning. I quickly began to question things, like many other Americans. Then with the vaccines, I trusted they wouldn’t approve vaccines that weren’t safe, but evidence has been rolling in for the past year of problems with the vaccines, so that will be a whole other chapter in this epic pandemic fail.
Mostly, I think about how stupid I was to ever trust government overreach was for the public good or trust a media effort that tirelessly worked to stoke terror and pressure us to just give up our rights and con us that was required to not kill grandma or care about other people. Just do what we tell you, or you’ll be ostracized and labeled a threat to society (like evildoers, “The Unvaccinated”) I hope I won’t be fooled the next time there’s a massive power grab underway, no matter what the crisis is.
Filed under COVID-19, General Interest, Politics
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