What a Year This Has Been!

Remember back in 2020 how we kept commenting on how weird things were in the world? People put up memes about apocalypse bingo. We still think of that as a landmark weird year. But we never got fully back to normal. Things just keep reeling out of control.

But what we could say is that 2022 is the year of “I told you so.” Of course we wouldn’t actually say that, because it’s considered bad form. But there are some stories we had absolutely right in 2020 that were marked, banned, and censored as “misinformation,” as though putting out an opinion on social media was a dangerous thing. Then this year, one after another, those stories we knew were true in 2020 but that were squelched are now admitted as true. Here’s a brief list:

·       The Hunter Biden laptop is real—it’s authentic, it shows the corruption of the Biden family—as we first mentioned in 2019, and the laptop verified in 2020, well ahead of the election, if only the public had been allowed to see it. So far no investigations or arrests are underway.

·       The COVID-19 “vaccines” were neither safe nor effective—nor qualified as vaccines. Now even the public is aware of the dangers, particularly to young people, through myocarditis, blood clots, lowered immune function, and more. So far the government continues to fearmonger and pretend we don't know what we know. And, suddenly China is suffering high death rates despite low death rates elsewhere worldwide.

·       Meanwhile, care such as increasing Vitamin D, zinc, and other supplements can be helpful, as can early treatment with formerly widely available and safe drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, if you can get them now. But best of all is natural immunity, which most people now have—with the nonvaccinated benefitting more than the vaccinated. Oh, and masks never did work.

·       Elections in 2020 were corrupt beyond belief. Elections since then, even under closer scrutiny, continue to be corrupt. So far lawsuits are thwarted, and evidence is ignored.

There are plenty of other similar and related stories that we knew all along were true, even though we could be cancelled for saying so.

I wrote fewer posts this year. Most years, writing twice weekly, I would produce around 100 posts. This year I was down to around 60. Some posts were so long, it still added up; my apologies. But schedule changes in my life leave me struggling to get in one day a week dedicated to this blog. However, that means it was a bit easier to look at everything I wrote this year and catalog it into categories, some of which I’ll share today as a summary of the year at the Spherical Model.

I spent a lot of time this year actively involved in good citizenship. I worked at the polls during four elections. I worked on a primary campaign. Then I worked several months straight on district platform and then state platform. About a quarter of this year’s blog posts were related to those local and state political activities; I’m leaving those out of the list below, but they’re still available of course in the archives. 

Some posts cover more than one category. That’s the nature of interrelated ideas. But I do feel like this was a good body of work for such a weird year. The first two categories, Constitution vs. Tyranny and Philosophy and Culture, are related to political philosophy, which is what the Spherical Model is. The others, which also relate to the Spherical Model—because everything political, economic or cultural does—are more topical.

There was good news related to abortion, freeing us from being a total nation under condemnation, although that fight at the state level is now just underway. And there was disturbing news of a war in Ukraine, still ongoing. I have found it confusing from the beginning, because of unreliable news sources, and have mostly stayed out of the discussion. But I have not approved of the many billions of taxpayer dollars spent there, in a corrupt country with known corrupt ties to the Biden family. And this week it was announced that Ukraine President Zelensky is closely tied to the World Economic Forum—the ones who want to collapse the world economy to start over, using a model that allows them to control all the people, in admiration of the China model. I feel bad for the people in Ukraine, as I do any people suffering under corrupt and/or tyrannical leadership.

Election Integrity is a bigger story. So is censorship, with some of the collusion between government and Big Tech coming out in the Twitter files, after the purchase by Elon Musk. “Woke” policies being pushed on our children continues to be a big story.

I think people are waking up to what has been going on. What is not clear is whether waking up and finding themselves in a post-constitutional tyranny allows the suddenly awakened to do anything about their plight. But I do believe that, if good people have their free will taken away, that’s not something God will long tolerate. I hope we are good enough to merit His rescue. As I occasionally repeat, “Hosanna!” which means “come and rescue.”

I hope you’ll enjoy the year-end review.

 

Constitution vs. Tyranny

Howard Chandler Christy's "Scene at the Signing of
the Constitution of the United States"
image found on Wikipedia

·        June 6, 2022: People Really Mean It: No More Tyranny

·        July 21, 2022: Famine by Design

·        August 11, 2022: We Agree; We Don't Want Authoritarian Rule

·        September 5, 2022: The Existential Threat

·        September 12, 2022: Who Should Have the Helm

·        September 15, 2022: Our Miraculous Constitution

·        October 13, 2022: Our Constitutional Republic Has Suddenly Become a Fascist Tyranny

·        October 25, 2022: Public Speaking [video presentation explaining the Spherical Model]

Joe Biden gives anti-Republican speech,
September 2, 2022
image found as screenshot here

 

Philosophy and Culture

·        January 3, 2022: Be It Resolved

·        April 7, 2022: Nihilism Is Not a Life Plan

·        April 14, 2022: All Things Testify of Him

·        July 28, 2022: Changing the World One Job at a Time

·        December 12, 2022: Anticipating the Messiah

 

Election Integrity

·        March 7, 2022: When Does Incompetence Become Cover for Intentional Wrongdoing

illustration of someone mailing multiple ballots,
found in this August 29, 2020, New York Post article

·        May 12, 2022: Chain-of-Custody Issues

·        July 19, 2022: No One Sits at Home on Election Day

·        July 25, 2022: Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention

·        November 11, 2022: We Are at War

·        November 21, 2022: Election Debacle Report

 

Abortion

March for Life 2022
Getty image 

·        January 24, 2022: Maybe This Will Be the Year

·        May 5, 2022: Abomination in Our Nation

·        July 7, 2022: SCOTUS Has Ended Life as We Know It—For the Better

·        August 4, 2022: Pregnancy Resource Centers Aren’t the Ones Faking Care

·        September 29, 2022: Words of the Unwise

 

Censorship and News

image is a screenshot from this Facts Matter video

·        April 29, 2022: Of Course They Want to Control Our Speech

·        May 3, 2022: Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation—and Censorship

·        June 9, 2022: Two Movies You Couldn’t Make Again

·        July 15, 2022: Power Mongering

·        August 8, 2022: Good News among the Bad

·        August 15, 2022: Unprecedented

·        August 25, 2022: Let Me Put You on Hold

·        December 1, 2022: The Threat

 

COVID-19

strange clots found by embalmers
screenshot from here

·        January 10, 2022: So Many Things They Know That Aren’t So [also updates on January 6]

·        January 28, 2022: Charts and Other Info

·        February 3, 2022: Evil Enough for You

·        July 12, 2022: Putting the Pieces Together

·        September 8, 2022: News from the Front Lines

·        December 15, 2022: It’s Over

 

Schools—CRT and LGBTQ Agendas

Matt Walsh speaks with Masai tribesmen to ask them,
"What is a woman?" screenshot from here

·        January 14, 2022: Hearing They Hear Not, Neither Do They Understand

·        January 17, 2022: Oppression Is Evil

·        April 4, 2022: Take the Money and Run—Or Just Run

·        April 18, 2022: Local School-Related Irreconcilable Differences

·        April 21, 2022: Schools Are Not Families

 

War in Ukraine—Geopolitics

map found here

·        March 3, 2022: Fools Rush In

·        March 10, 2022: What’s Going On?

 

Economics and Public Policy

·        August 29, 2022: Stopping Crime

·        October 6, 2022: How Much Is $31 Trillion

Anticipating the Messiah

It’s almost Christmas. The thing about Christmas is, during most of the year it seems forever away. But then it comes. Every year that day finally comes.

Some of our small to tiny nativities, surrounding a favorite
verse of scripture from the Book of Mormon: 2 Nephi 25:26

I’ve been thinking about that anticipation. The Old Testament points us to what to look for at His coming. The sacrifices. The lamb without blemish. So many verses that, when we hear them, we hear the music of Handel’s Messiah using those words as lyrics.

·        Zechariah 9:9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

·        Job 19:25-26  25 For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:  26 And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

·        Isaiah 7:14 Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

·        Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

·        Isaiah 35:5-6   5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.  6 Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.

·        Isaiah 53:3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

·        Isaiah 53:4-5  4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.  5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

·        Isaiah 53: 6  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Somewhere to the east of Jerusalem were the wise men, educated, possibly royal, who were looking up at the skies to see the star indicating He would be born. They knew it when they saw it, knew its meaning. And they went into action to travel, so that they could witness that they had seen Him, the prophesied Messiah. They must have been watching, maybe much of their lives, recognizing that the time was nigh for the star to appear.

The grandkids (2020) portraying the wise men looking to the follow the star.

In another part of the world, a story we get from the Book of Mormon, we have a prophecy around 5 BC that in five years’ time the Messiah would be born; the sign would be a night of no darkness. The population was a mix of believers and unbelievers. The unbelievers did not believe in religious freedom. What would it have hurt them to have people among them who were believers? Yet, as the five years drew to a close, they started saying the prophecy was proven false. They mocked. And worse, they proclaimed that, on a certain day, if the sign did not come, the believers would be put to death.

Five years could be an exact time frame, a set number of days. Or it could be an approximation—anywhere from within a couple of months before five years up to maybe five and a half years or so. The believers weren’t ready to say, “You’re right; it didn’t happen.” They saw it as still in the range of five years or so. “They did watch steadfastly for that day and that night and that day which should be as one day as if there were no night” (3 Nephi 1:8). They were faithful believers. But they were also fearful that the designated execution day might arrive before the sign was given.

Their prophet, Nephi (one of several prophets by that name whose stories are recounted in the 1,000-year history of the Book of Mormon peoples) went to the Lord. And he was told, “Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the sign be given, and on the morrow come I into the world” (3 Nephi 1:13). The prophecy was indeed fulfilled: “At the going down of the sun there was no darkness; and the people began to be astonished because there was no darkness when the night came” (3 Nephi 1:15).

By the way, when the dark of night came the next day, sure enough, “a new star did appear, according to the word” (3 Nephi 1:21).

Some people were convinced of the reality of their Lord and Savior because of the sign given; others were convinced that those prophesies had come true, yet they found ways to convince themselves and others that they could go on living their lives of sin unchanged. That’s a thing about miracles; they increase the faith of the faithful, but they don’t convince those who refuse to be convinced.

If you’ve been watching The Chosen, you’ll see that. Many people want to follow the Savior—because they have seen the miracles and recognized the source. Others try to stop Him, try to stop those who follow Him, try to frame what He does as blasphemy or some other crime, rather than seeing what ought to be clear, right in front of them, because of the scriptures they are familiar with from all their study.

I’d like to go back to that idea of anticipation. We can look at those times, and imagine what it must have felt like to anticipate His first coming. Those people of Nephi, waiting, watching, day after day, knowing the Great Day would come soon. And be fearful that it might not come soon enough. But they would watch faithfully anyway.

What we know, from the testimonies of the New Testament—and the Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Christ—is that He did come. Jesus of Nazareth was born, according to prophecy, ministered and taught and established His Church. And he was crucified, as prophesied. And He rose from the dead, a glorified, resurrected being, on the third day, as prophesied.

First page of a quick search for
"in that day" in the Old Testament.

So much of the Old Testament looks toward Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. But the next most common reference in the Old Testament—and added to in the New Testament—is the day of His Second Coming. “In that day…” the scriptures will say, or possibly “in the last days.” One thing we ought to know from His First Coming is that the prophesies come to pass, every detail. They may not look the way anticipating people imagine—in those times, people expected a military conqueror who would free them from political oppression, yet He told them, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

So some—much—of what we picture for our times we might not recognize, or understand. But the prophesies will be fulfilled. But there are enough things happening that we can see clearly, such as “calling evil good and good evil,” that we ought to be paying attention.

So we’re anticipating, again, these two millennia later, the imminent coming of our Messiah. The annual anticipation of the Christmas celebration of His birth is a metaphor for that waiting that we’re doing. It seems the day will never come. Then it seems imminent, and we scramble to make ready—to get and wrap the presents, prepare the special foods, learn the music, make plans for gathering together; or, in a spiritual sense, to make sure we have oil in our lamps in time for Him to come.

Oil lamp, as in the parable of the ten virgins,
image found here

Then, following the hurry of the imminent arrival, the day comes. For us, annually, it comes. And in a coming day, that Great Day of His Second Coming will come. For now, may our annual Christmas celebration be always a reminder that our anticipation is not in vain. He will come. May that day come quickly.

It’s Over

I’m declaring that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. While I have no authority to make such a declaration for the world, I can use common sense and make decisions for myself. And in this case they do seem to align with reality.

Biden declared the pandemic over, and he has titular authority. But those surrounding him walked that back, saying no, not really over over, still worth worrying about and therefore worth submitting to orders from the elites.

For some time I've thought I would write one last post on the subject. And my plan was to use the data I collect daily, chart it, and compare the various years or segments of years, and thereafter give myself permission to stop the habit of daily trips to the data sites. However, a month or two ago, the sources that had been giving daily data changed to weekly, or what seems random but is something like every 3-5 days. Others are daily, but since they aggregate from less frequent sources, they make daily charting less accurate. So I may or may not ever get to that comparison chart. But I can show a few things. Here are a couple of charts (not made by me):

charts from here on December 14, 2022

These are low resolution, but you can see the progression of the pandemic. We had a sizable bump in cases in January 2021 (coinciding, coincidentally, with the rollout of vaccines), and then another bump late summer, followed by a huge bump in January 2022. January 2021 was the Delta variant mainly. January 2022 was Omicron—a much milder strain, albeit perhaps even more contagious. After that January spike, there was a steep drop-off in cases, which continues to trickle on to pretty much background noise.

Parallel are the deaths due to COVID-19. We had the initial stage around April 2020, a bump in late summer, a large spike in January 2021, then a couple of lesser rises in fall 2021 to January 2022. January 2022 was a much lower spike than the previous year, despite a much higher spike in cases—again, showing the Omicron variant was less deadly. After January 2022 deaths dropped precipitously, and they remain low. This is likely due to the ubiquitous Omicron variant and its subvariants, which are more like a bad cold than the scary thing we were told we were facing in early-to-mid 2020.

Whether you’re measuring cases or deaths, there’s not much news there anymore. With the fear of sudden death—or suddenly killing granny—some people are able to approach the subject more rationally, at last. But not very rationally.

Pandemic Amnesty

A few weeks ago there was a piece that got some attention, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” by Emily Oster for The Atlantic, October 31, 2022.  It attempts to be a thoughtful piece, talking through some of the things we did in the beginning out of fear, or lack of knowledge; we just didn’t know better. I’ve been thinking deeply about the casual dismissal for weeks now. And this week Joshua Philipp on Crossroads interviewed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty about calls for amnesty related to the pandemic (in two parts, here and here). Dr. Kheriaty considers the suggestion in the Atlantic piece with a lot more depth, and with a lot more background about medical ethics, which is his specialty.

So, instead of writing “one last piece,” with lots of charts (maybe I’ll still do that someday), I really want to look at how/whether we can go forward with forgiveness.

Oster seems to think that being right or wrong about things related to the pandemic was mainly just a matter of luck. But she lists things that we either did know, could have known if we were paying attention (I did), or things we shouldn’t have done regardless of what we knew.

She talks about how she and her family, back around April 2020, hiked with homemade cloth masks on, alerting each other to oncoming people on the trail, so they could avoid them—when we soon knew that the disease wasn’t spreading by casual passing outdoors. And that those cloth masks didn’t work anyway. (Nor did any other masks work on viruses, which were much smaller than the particles filtered out.) How silly that seems now that we know better.

OK. I wore a mask—but never out of fear; only out of compliance to law or to request from church or stores, etc., where they were required to alleviate other people’s fears or to comply with imposed regulations in order to not get shut down. In the past more than a year, the only place I have worn a mask is in a doctor’s office that still requires masks (of any sort, regardless of efficacy), even though they should know better.

Oster tries to make it look like—well, there were misunderstandings on both sides. She says,

Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

I remember when people intending to mislead tried to claim there were people recommending injecting bleach—a falsehood and wild misrepresentation of some of the work that was being done in reality. I remember that huge amounts of actual truth were being labeled as misinformation. I wrote this about the accusation in April 2020 when it happened: 

There was nothing in what President Trump said that wasn’t related to UV rays as a disinfectant. Take a look at the transcript. [I transcribed the President in the footnote.] If you heard “disinfectant” and thought only of Lysol and Clorox, and “inject” and thought only of a needle—not that light the dentist “injects” into your mouth to cure the material used in your filling, or not the scope the gastroenterologist “injects” to view your intestines during a colonoscopy—that is your failure to see things in more than one limited way.

Was misinformation a huge problem, and is it still? It was, but only because the elites were purposefully misinforming us, and then censoring us when we countered with the truth. And yes, that is still a problem, but the more truth that gets out, the more people are realizing what got censored was the truth all along.

I remember the silencing of doctors who were having success with various treatments. I remember these things because they haven’t ended yet. Some of the most respected and successful doctors, giving real data, using real science, are even now being silenced and discredited—and their credentials being stripped from them—not because they’re saying wildly incorrect and dangerous things, but because they do not align with the worldwide cabal’s stated narrative. I’m talking about doctors like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, and a number of others.

And if Oster is characterizing things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as akin to “injecting themselves with bleach,” or possibly “eating horse paste,” then that is simply another lie. If we’re supposed to agree that both sides were wrong on some things, that won’t fly; all the censoring was of truth that we knew and were not allowed to say.

And therefore we are not ready for amnesty.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is an interesting and complex abstract idea. There is a somewhat messy mix of “I want to get along,” “I want to see justice done,” “I want to be a good person, but I’m still feeling injured,” and more. Oster’s piece sort of says, let’s just put all that behind us and move on; after all, we were all equally wrong about some things. Except—we weren’t equally wrong. Beyond the very early time when I sanitized my groceries before putting them away in my house—a practice I imposed on no one else—I was seeking truth and finding more and more of it, mostly at odds with the Fauci lies.

Related to this pandemic there are a few people I can agree to amnesty with, people who were sincere, frightened, and misinformed, but also never militant against those who didn’t see things the same way they did. They might have worried about non-mask-wearers or non-vaccine-getters, but they wouldn’t have ostracized us or condemned us.

But there were others, like those who shouted at friends of mine who were walking together, husband, wife, and son, because they weren’t socially distancing—outside, only among people who lived together in the same house. The shouters don’t deserve amnesty; they need to change their ways and prove they can be trusted in society again.

Then there’s the next level up, the silencers, the ones who set and enforced rules against disagreement. Censorship is not an accident of temporary misunderstanding; it is a constitutional-level crime. Have amends been made? Have they even stopped doing it yet?

Nuremberg image, screenshot from here

There are those who imposed vaccine mandates—of an untested experimental drug—on people, against the very principles of the Nuremberg Code, principles we imposed on ourselves to keep atrocities such as happened during WWII from ever happening again. The ones who broke their contracts with hospital employees, college students, and travelers as a coercion to take such medical interventions—have they made up the losses in pay and opportunities to those who wouldn’t give in to their coercion? A few are finally considering it. But how do you explain refusing a kidney transplant to a child because she is unvaccinated—when she wasn’t at serious risk from the illness but did have elevated risk from the vaccines? Such decisions are evil. This is ongoing, so clearly there’s no making amends there yet. Have such power wielders apologized and compensated those who took the experimental vaccines under duress and who may have suffered injury or death as a result?

There are those who set the policies in motion. There are those who encouraged the creation of the virus, and then covered up its origins, lied about them. There are those who took the safe and effective (and cheap) drugs off the market, or took away doctors’ abilities to prescribe them—with the full knowledge that they would work, and that depriving people of them would cause suffering and death. (I wrote about this here.) 

We could speculate that such people—Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the CCP, the WEF, the WHO, the CDC—that they knew the catastrophic death and injury they would cause and were fine with that, for whatever ulterior motive: greed, Malthusian death plots, power mongering. Is it even possible in this life for such people to make amends? For millions of deaths? For many more millions of injuries from the illness and/or from the so-called vaccines? For trillions of dollars in economic loss? For the loss of freedom and opportunity to heretofore free societies?

You can’t wave off such things with a blanket call for pandemic amnesty. We need compensation. We need to be made whole. And we need absolute rock-hard guarantees that such things will never happen again. We can only approach getting such guarantees if we hold accountable the wrongdoers in this pandemic.

Forgiveness is a complex thing. According to Dr. Stephen Marmer you might look at it in three levels. The first is exoneration: this is acting as if the wrong never happened. You exonerate wrongdoers who are incapable of knowing they were in the wrong, such as young children, or people who express their sincere sorrow, regret the hurt they caused, do all they can to make amends, and go forward with every effort not to cause that hurt again. For such people, you continue the relationship as though the wrong never happened.

According to Dr. Stephen Marmer, there are 3 types of forgiveness:
exoneration, forbearance, and release. Screenshot from here.

What about people who don’t sincerely apologize, or maybe don’t even recognize the hurt they’ve caused? Depending on the severity of the hurt and the value you place on the relationship, you might use what Dr. Marmer refers to as forbearance. This is for that in-law at Thanksgiving dinner who always says something offensive. Do you put up with it, because having the other relatives together is important enough? It’s up to you.

But what about for severe wrongdoing, abuse, harm? Under these circumstances, it might not be possible for a person to make amends. Deaths may have happened. Financial losses beyond what can be paid back might have happened. Irreparable harm may have been done. What then?

We’re supposed to forgive all—according to scriptures: Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 6:37; Ephesians 4:32; Doctrine & Covenants 64:10.

What does forgiveness really mean? Do we let murderers walk the streets to kill again, just so we can virtue signal that we are the forgiving type? No, we must not do that.

What we can do is get out of the revenge business. We can leave getting justice to the law. We can, as Dr. Marmer says, release. This may include never interacting with the person again, in some cases. It may look very different from exoneration. It still removes the poison of vengeance from you personally.

You might see this level of forgiveness in a messy divorce, in which the spouse and/or children were abused. You separate as cleanly and completely as possible. Never tolerate any more abuse. End contact if possible. The forgiveness shows in the lessening need to talk about the wrongdoings of the offender, because you have released the vengeance, so you can go forward with your life, free of both the abuser and the poison of ongoing bitterness and anger about it.

In the case of a murderer, we let the law (assuming the law is just, and not corrupt) take care of getting the perpetrator to “pay his debt to society.” You can’t bring back a dead person, but you can take the perpetrator’s freedom away (or in some capital murder cases, his life), putting him in a place where he can do no more harm to society and is paying a cost for the crime.

In the case of the mass murderers involved in this pandemic, we may or may not ever see justice come in this life. Still, we can release the vengeance for God to take care of. It does not delight me to picture the outcomes that are likely to come to such perpetrators. But I know God is both just and merciful—knowing mercy cannot rob justice. So any mercy granted must entail the character changes and making amends—the repentance—that God requires.

As for us, in whatever ways are in our powers, we must hold such people accountable, and we must never trust them in a position of power over us. No exoneration. No forbearance. Release, yes, including excising them from our lives.

But forgive and forget? For the sake of respect for all those lives lost that cry from the dust, and for the sake of those who have suffered and continue to suffer because of the massive sins involved in this pandemic—we must not forget. As we said after WWII, we must never forget. And this time we had better mean it.

The Threat

I’ve been threatened. It’s censorship related. It’s pretty minor as far as how it will affect my life, more of an annoyance. But the principle of it, and the personal proximity, has my attention.

what came up Thursday on my Pinterest home feed

the email Pinterest sent me
November 28, 2022

I got an email Monday afternoon from social media site Pinterest. My daughter got me interested in this website more than a decade ago when we were planning her wedding. I had a board I called “Mother of the Bride Frenzy.” I was hunting for a dress, and reception decoration ideas, and various other things. Having a place where I could place a picture linked to a webpage was something I found useful.

The site itself was something like looking through the pictures in a magazine. Enjoyable and fun. I have boards for food, pet care, holiday ideas, various skills, crafts, arts. I don’t spend a lot of time on this site, but it’s enjoyable when I do. I also use it for looking up things—how-to tutorial videos, quotes, recipes. I’m glad this little corner of the world exists.

Some years ago, I’m thinking 2-3, I discovered you could make a private board. You could save things without sharing them to anyone who happened to follow your feed; only you could see the things on this private board. I found it handy for things I wanted to read and explore more later, or get back to—to make it easy to find those things again—without having my curiosity exposed to strangers, or even maybe family members. I’m not talking nefarious things. I’m talking things political, or health related. Sometimes these are things I may consider writing about later. Or it may just be something I don’t have time to give my full attention when I come across it, and rather than leave it indefinitely in an open tab, I place it on this board.

If you have read this blog, you know such a collection may include things related to COVID-19 and associated “vaccines” and early treatment protocols. It might relate to election integrity—including stories questioning election outcomes. It might relate to climate studies. Often these “Pins” I create are to data-related sites, but many are articles or opinion pieces. Occasionally I may even save a story I strongly disagree with, because I want to go over it in detail later—maybe to understand other viewpoints, maybe to craft more effective counterarguments.

Note that because this is a private board, there is no question about my spreading “misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information,” because I’m not spreading them at all; I’m just preserving sources.

What got deleted? I don’t know. They have told me it was from my private board, but not which Pin it was. Unhelpfully, they mention, at the bottom of the email, “If you think we've made a mistake, you can submit an appeal within 7 days.” Maybe there are people who memorize all their Pins, so they can tell exactly which one is missing; I am not one of those people. But if I could identify a deleted Pin and wanted to submit an appeal, I couldn’t actually do that, because the link they give me goes to an error message. Hmm. Nothing on their help center allows me to submit an appeal either.

The link Pinterest's email provided to submit an appeal took me here.

Here was the most troubling paragraph, with the threat highlighted:

These rules apply to all Pins, including ones on your secret boards. Please take some time to go through your Pins and remove any that may be in violation of our Community Guidelines. If we notice more Pins that conflict with our guidelines, we may take further action on your account.

I take that to mean, “You’d better go through your board and remove Pins yourself, or you’ll lose your account—including everything you’ve saved to all those safe, innocuous boards—you rebellious non-comrade, you.”

So I did. I went back through a few months’ worth of Pins, removing any I thought might offend the censorship overlords, and I saved the links in a document. And I just won’t use this app in the way I have been using it. Because I do not need to. I don’t need to use it at all, but I prefer to be able to keep my decade's worth of collecting.

This is disappointing, because, up until now I haven’t felt the same censorship there as on Facebook and YouTube (and I suppose Twitter, if I used it, but I’ve never had an account there and don’t know if I will, even with recent changes). Pinterest is a private company, and not created as part of a conglomerate with other social media or tech giants (background story and video here). So why the same adherence to “woke” censorship as those other places?

I went through the Community Guidelines; they had provided several helpful links, intending that I would. There are, of course, many prohibitions I appreciate: adult content (porn), exploitation (more porn), hate and mocking aimed at individuals or ethnic/religious groups, profanity, private information, self-harm, graphic violence or threats, violent actors (groups), dangerous products or harmful or illegal activities (such as drug use), harmful or deceptive practices, impersonation (I’m assuming non-obvious parody), spam (which apparently doesn’t apply to advertising, which looks to be welcome).

It's not a bad list. But there in the middle—which I haven’t listed yet—are some rather nebulous prohibitions:

Misinformation (with some specifics):

o   Medical related, particularly anything not pro-vaccination

o   Civic participation misinformation (election related)

o   Climate misinformation

        

The Misinformation section of Pinterest's Community Guidelines.

I have to laugh about the "conspiracy theories" one. A recent meme suggested, if you're keeping score, "conspiracy theorists" are turning out to be right a lot more often than not.

meme found on Facebook, here

These are things they listed in the email, so I’m assuming my infraction must be related to the “misinformation” category. So those were the topics I considered removing when I went through to “cleanse” my private board.

I am bothered that this threat changed my behavior at all. It’s not that I feel weak, or as if I’m giving in. I’m simply not willing to use their site in the way it’s intended to be used—excluding ideas they don’t approve of. Fluffy magazine picture site it is; I will save important ideas someplace more secure. I appreciate learning the mentality of this public square site toward censorship. They will not change my views; they just will not have access to them.

That’s the thing about thought policing. You can silence people, but that makes them only more likely to think what they were thinking.

By the way, profanity and nudity are not well policed. It’s not a huge problem in my feed—but since these things are "against their community guidelines," they shouldn’t be coming up “randomly” in my feed at all. Yet they do. Hmm. Maybe it’s not about “community” standards; it’s about the standards of the thought controllers.

What to do about censorship? Go elsewhere to speak. But keep being a truth seeker and truth speaker. Keep thinking, considering, gathering information, forming conclusions. And definitely keep speaking—where you can be heard.

There are so many major issues going on right now; this one seems small. But if an entity is investigating my private—non-spreadable—idea collection, then that is pervasive. Which means it’s much bigger than this tiny personal story of mine. It is indeed threatening.