It’s Day 223 of the Ohio Shutdown, Day 159 of Pre-Game Calisthenics.
Deb and I are well. She’s stopped sneezing.
Here at Second Chance Ranch we’re getting quite the blow today, with steady 25mph winds gusting to around 40mph. The flagpole on the front porch snapped in two, signs promoting our state senator’s re-election were twisted and knocked over, and outdoor furniture was blown around.
On the bright side, the wind may have finished my yard work for me — the maples are now bare and the lawn is clean as a whistle, swept of fallen leaves.
At the moment the temp is 38 degrees with a wind chill of 28. Deb, standing at the kitchen window, swears she just saw snow flurries.
Interesting opinion piece in Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal — “The Other Media Blackout: How can Americans use good sense about an epidemic about which they are fed false information?”
Damned good question.
Government, especially at the state and local levels, is feeding the People only what serves its penchant for control and the players’ political ends. We’re cuffed by decrees and official scolding, backed by an endless drumbeat of dire statistics — cases, hospitalizations, deaths.
We hear precious little — in Ohio, we hear virtually nothing — about progress, recoveries and the like. No, that’d damp the flue and temper the fear.
A free press, which should be the People’s watchdog, has become the State’s lapdog. The mainstream media are largely useless to us as we navigate the “pandemic.”
Enter social media, such as it is, and independent journalism. Here and now, that’s where propaganda is dissected, disputed and debunked.
That, of course, requires individuals to seek out the truth. Since initiative isn’t most Americans’ strong suit, however, that truth is destined to be squashed — even suppressed — by the State-Press alliance.
But it’s there. It’s up to us to know it. And many of us do.
We know that the State has been consistently, repeatedly wrong and needlessly repressive. You and I, prudently cautious in the early days and weeks of the “pandemic,” now know that the threat has been grossly exaggerated.
When we hear The Shaming Class accuse us of flouting “science,” we know that science is neither monolithic nor is it settled. When a lifetime of experience informs us that the State’s recommendations are nothing but virtue-signaling theater, mechanisms of control, we say so — out loud — and we decline to reflexively comply.
In short, we live like citizens, not subjects. It’s what we should be doing anyway.
Sixteen years ago last August I worked an event with a resident of The Swamp — not a denizen in the uncomplimentary sense, just a guy who made his living from the creatures who dwell there.
Because it was just the two of us, over the course of the week we had plenty of time to talk. During an after-work conversation one evening, accompanied by Marlboro Reds and good Tennessee whiskey, I asked him to name names — who are the worst people to work with in Washington?
I expected him to be diplomatic. He wasn’t.
He lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “I can work with pretty much anyone down there. But one, a senator, is just the greasiest, slimiest, sell-his-mother son-of-a-bitch I think I’ve ever met.”
He took another drag, then looked me in the eye.
“Joe Biden.”
I could tell that merely saying the name made him angry. I tried to change the subject, but my colleague had a parting shot. He pointed the coal of the cigarette at me.
“Joe Biden can’t be trusted — ever — and everyone in Washington knows it. Remember that.”
That was 2004, and Daffy The Gaffe Machine already had been in Washington for over three inconsequential decades. Think he’s any more trustworthy now?
We have two days to save our country.
Take care of yourselves. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath
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