A Pattern Not Worth Repeating

I see a pattern. We ought to learn from patterns. But maybe some people don’t learn.

I’m going to use three historic examples, all within my adult memory, plus a current one. And then we’ll talk about the pattern.

archive illustration found on Pixabay

 

LA Riots— Rodney King, 1991-2

Before I start with this one, I want to go back a bit further. We lived in California during the mid-1980s. A neighbor was a police officer. I remember him telling us about an incident that had happened recently on a freeway we frequently used in the east Bay Area. I don’t remember all of the details of that incident, but there was gunfire, and I believe both an officer and the suspect were killed. The neighbor told us that the guy was on PCP. His eyes told the officers that. The guy had a gun, and a crazy look, and there was no reasoning. Guys on PCP have crazy strength and just keep going. I don’t remember for certain, but I think they had to shoot him, more than once, to take him down and stop him from menacing the public.

That story stuck with me.

Rodney King, photo from here

Now, it was the early 90s. We no longer lived in California, but it was LA where this took place. A guy named Rodney King took the police on a high-speed chase—as fast as 115 mph—for eight miles, before he got blocked and they tried to apprehend him. He resisted arrest, acted strange, laughing and waving at a police helicopter overhead, and continued to try to get away.

The officers used batons, rather than more certainly lethal weapons. (I think a taser might also have been used; King claimed a burn mark from a taser.) But he kept getting up.

What the video showed was multiple officers (four were charged) beating an apparently unarmed man, repeatedly, in what looked like excessive force.

The officers were acquitted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, and three were acquitted of excessive force, while one was left undecided by the jury. The case had been moved out of LA County, to Simi Valley, where the jury, rather than being all or mostly black, was majority white with an Asian and a Hispanic.

The verdict of the case was the ostensible catalyst for rioting that lasted days. Many businesses were destroyed—mostly minority-owned. Billions of dollars in damages.

A later federal civil trial found two of the officers guilty of depriving Rodney King of his civil rights. But this was after the damage was done.

I’m probably one of the few Americans from that time period that never saw the video of the beating. I don’t really know why; I think I didn’t consume a great deal of TV news, and I had little kids around me all the time, and I didn’t want to see the violence.

But I heard about it, of course. And my first thought was that story of the guy near San Jose years earlier who had been on PCP.

Rodney King wasn’t tested for alcohol until hours after the arrest; results came back just under the legal limit. That means he was very likely quite impaired during the high-speed chase. Toxicology came back negative for PCP, but there was some marijuana in his system. PCP can remain in a person’s system for one to two weeks. So I think we have to assume his erratic behavior wasn’t caused by PCP. But, if you were an officer, just ending an adrenalin-charged high-speed chase to apprehend a danger to traffic, and your life and others’ had been in danger, and then the guy gets out and acts erratically and continues to resist arrest no matter what force has been inflicted—you would probably assume this was PCP or something similar, and that your life was in danger if you didn’t subdue him. [Note: PCP, along with alcohol and cocaine, was in his system at the time of his death by drowning in 2012.]

According to court reports, the officers’ defense was that they followed their training. That may be true.

Whether to follow a speeding car to pull him over, and then have an ensuing high-speed chase were decisions made without knowing the race of the person in the vehicle. Whether to subdue the resisting perpetrator, and use force to do so, were decisions made regardless of the race of the individual—who was doing what he was doing, and just happened to be the race that he was.

King was not an innocent black man who just happened to become the target of racist cops. One reason he stated for attempting to flee was that he was in violation of parole. But being a target of racism is the story that set off the riots.

I got some historical details from these two sources, plus an AI search of court proceedings:

·         “The 1992LA Riots: A Historian‘s Perspective on the Causes and Consequences” 

·        “Los Angeles Riots of 1992” Britannica 

 

Hands Up Don’t Shoot!—Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, 2014

In 2014, a black man was shot and killed by police. The media claimed that he had his hands up and had said “Don’t shoot!” but the cop shot him anyway. The grand jury heard testimony that there could be a case, but the prosecutor, going through that information, chose not to prosecute, and found the officer had acted in self-defense.

Michael Brown, illustration found here

Again, this was claimed to be systemic racism against an innocent unarmed black man. But what had actually happened was much different than the media story. I wrote about it at the time, so I’ll repeat the basic story:

 A very large young man, on drugs, robs a store, shoving the (Asian) store owner on his way out with unpaid-for merchandise. Minutes later, when a report of the robbery is being sent to police officers nearby, he’s walking down the middle of the street, where he will attract the attention of law enforcement. He doesn’t take direction to get out of the street, but reaches in to a police vehicle, attacks the officer, goes for his gun, threatens his life.

When the officer shoots, still with the perpetrator looming over him within the police car, the man begins to run away. He has just represented himself as a threat; it is the officer’s duty to pursue to see where he goes, particularly because this is near residential areas; people could be harmed by this man. In Officer Wilson’s statement, he never intended to apprehend the big, dangerous man alone. He had called for backup and was just keeping eye contact. But Michael Brown turned around and started coming at the officer.

Considering the previous attempt on the officer’s life, just moments before, there were a lot of things the officer could fear: another physical attack that might knock him out; losing control of the weapon and having it used on him and on other innocent civilians. He fired several rounds at the charging man. He saw a flinch, so he knew he had hit him. He paused. Michael Brown didn’t do the normal thing—stop, hold up his empty hands, surrender. After being shot, he continued to charge at the officer. He kept charging, despite additional bullet wounds. Nothing stopped him but the final head shot—when he was within three yards of the officer.

Unarmed does not mean not dangerous. Clearly this man was dangerous and was exhibiting threatening behavior. Would it have been nice if we had some sort of instantaneous tranquilizer gun, instead of real bullets? Maybe. But when you’re up against a criminal with real bullets, you might not want to risk a slow response to his getting hit. And you might not know in the moment all the details that get examined after the fact. So officers carry guns, and I think we’re in agreement that’s for our protection and theirs.

What about Tasers? Good in some circumstances. But you have to be quite close, with all circumstances right. And there is always a chance they could still cause death. So I’m still waiting to hear what problem exists with the system.

There was one sure, certain way this tragedy could have been avoided: Michael Brown could have behaved less like a thuggish threat and more like a civilized human being.

He could have raised his hands to show he had no weapon. He could have respectfully obeyed the officer. He would probably still be alive if he had done everything wrong except for charging at Officer Wilson even after receiving bullet wounds. Stopping at any point would have saved his life.

I link to several sources within my piece; plus I referred to another historical source, both below:

·       "Contrasting Civilization and Savagery in Ferguson" December 1, 2014. 

·       “Michael Brown is killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” This Day in History, published August 6, 2020.

 

Summer of Love—George Floyd, 2020

Remember, I’m one of the few people who never watched the Rodney King beating video. I am also one of the few who never watched the video of the officer on the neck of George Floyd. (I have seen photos and short snippets; even these, like the accompanying photo here, look shocking.) This may make me seem less informed than the ordinary person. But I think, for me, I was better able to hear facts and evidence without the emotions the video would cause.

George Floyd, held down by
Officer Derek Chauvin,
image from Wikipedia

I wrote about this quite a lot at the time, although not a lot describing the actual event, more about the aftermath—what got termed the "Summer of Love" or "mostly peaceful protests" that led to billions in property destruction. My first impression was that the story we were given by the media was accurate: that a 44-year-old white police officer, Derek Chauvin, had caused the death of a black man, George Floyd, brought into custody for using a counterfeit bill at a store, and then resisting arrest and behaving erratically. I believed the country agreed it was a bad act, while there were disagreements on what to charge, and what should be done.

As we went through the case and learned more, what we learned was that the man, George Floyd, was in bad health. And he was a drug user. And it was possible that he swallowed drugs to avoid prosecution for having them in his possession. We also eventually learned that he did not die of asphyxiation, but of heart failure. The officer was holding him down in a position that he was trained to do while waiting for paramedics, which had been called. Think back on the PCP situation and Rodney King; police have good reason to be wary of suspects behaving erratically. It may be an ironic twist that the training given to Officer Chauvin was in order to avoid the apparent police brutality in the Rodney King case.

Without argument, there was nothing in the case showing racism, and racism was not even brought up in the case. But that was the pretext for the weeks of rioting and looting, and the spread of Black Lives Matter across the country and around the world.

Below are the pieces I wrote during that first month.

·        “Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters” June 1, 2020 

·        “Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters, Part II” June 4, 2020 

·        “Chaos Is Tyranny” June 8, 2020 

·        “Those Who Stir Up to Anger vs. Those Who Inspire” July 6, 2020 

 

Deportation—Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Returned to El Salvador, April, 2025

This current story in the news this month is different in that it doesn’t involve white police and black suspects. It’s about an illegal alien from El Salvador, who was sent back along with other criminal offenders to an El Salvador prison.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, image from here

The news story claims that this was a mistake, that the man was guaranteed safety from being sent back to his home country. The media refers to him as a Maryland man, a married father.

They leave out some crucial details. He is an MS-13 gang member; this was adjudicated twice. His wife twice had protective orders against him for beating her. He was directed to leave the country in 2019. There was an order not to deport him to a particular country—but it was Guatemala, not El Salvador. A clerical error in the court papers? Well, probably not. His claim had been that a gang was threatening him and his family, which had been doing a pupusa business out of their home in El Salvador, from which he fled to the US. However, the rival gang had been destroyed since then, after President Bukele’s crackdown on gangs—changing the country from the most dangerous to one of the safest in the world. So the threat to Garcia no longer existed. And the family, previously threatened by the rival gang, was no longer in El Salvador, but were in Guatemala.

When MS-13 was designated a terrorist organization, that overrode any previous order preventing his deportation to a particular place. He was deported to the country of his origin—and citizenship—where he was wanted as an illegal gang member.

In other words, Garcia was not mistakenly deported to El Salvador; he was legally deported to his home country of El Salvador. [He has since been moved from the terrorist prison, CECOT, to a less intimidating prison.]

A federal judge took it upon himself to claim the President had no right to deport this illegal alien gang member. He ordered the plane—already in flight—to be turned around on his order. And he is trying to find the President guilty of insubordination. That means he sees the President as one of his subordinates, which is laughable.

What we do not need to worry about is ICE “kidnapping” and deporting innocent legal aliens, let alone naturalized  or native born US citizens with Hispanic surnames. [I actually know people with these needless worries.]

There were a number of sources on the more accurate details of this story. Among my favorites was an explanation to the media by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This full 14-minute clip from C-SPAN has him answer the question near the beginning, but he adds details later as well. 

Most of the information I got came from Robert Gouveia videos, in which he went through the court documents. Here is one from two weeks ago:

  ·        “Trump Held in CONTEMPT! Kilmar Hoax SHATTERED! Poison Pill Attorney FIRED! Tish James BUSTED!” 

  

What Is the Pattern?

Someone, an enemy of civilization, looks for a narrative. They need an example case; they are ever on the lookout for such a case. In several of these (and we could have added Trayvon Martin, given time and space for yet another), they find what is supposed to be a typical innocent black man harmed or killed by systemically racist police officers. And in the last one, it is supposed to be a typical illegal alien, come here to build a better life, innocent except for that transgression of entering the country illegally.

In every case, they have used very non-innocent suspects and non-racist officials. If there are actual examples of their narrative—which there would be, if the narrative were true—they could find plenteous examples. But they don’t.

They say things like, even though it isn’t precisely true in this case, it’s the overarching truth, the bigger truth.

But, again, if it were true in the larger sense, there ought to be examples galore. Are they just really unlucky, happening serially upon negative examples by chance, among all the other incidences of systemic whatever they’re claiming?

More likely, they choose really bad examples of innocence being oppressed by their enemies—We, the People—because their narrative is false.

Some people might have believed them the first time or two. But lately (see "The Propaganda Beast Is in a Doom Loop"), fewer people are falling for the false narrative. And that could bode well for our future.

Panel of Experts

Texas State Senator Bob Hall held an online meeting with a number of doctors this past Friday, in response to an Texas Department of State Health Services conference that had just happened, with a Dr. John Hellerstedt. The doctors on Senator Hall’s online call took issue with many of the DSHS statements. Each of the doctors spoke for 5-10 minutes and then may have answered a question or two. The first of these was Dr. Peter McCullough, and I’ll quote him at length here below. But the second doctor said something I’ll use as today’s theme.

screenshot from Senator Bob Hall's (upper right) panel of boots-on-the-ground doctors

Dr. Ben Edwards (middle right in the screenshot above) said people need to get their information from trusted sources. People who believe very differently from me, particularly related to the pandemic, maybe also other issues, say that same thing. It’s just that they trust different sources. So how do you tell who is trustworthy? Maybe it should be someone with a track record of being right.

Dr. Edwards points out that we have some history now, with the pandemic, of people who have said things and been either accurate or inaccurate. He says those who have proven inaccurate multiple times tend to say things that instill fear. We should use some common sense, and trust the immune system God gave us; it works. But, if you’re stressed to the point of overwhelm by fear, that’s actually bad for your immune system. “So, be careful who you’re letting your ears listen to.”

Sometimes you have to try out a source for a while, be open to the possibility they could go either way, until you know more. The truth tends to come out eventually.

So that’s the approach I’m using here. I’m referencing real doctors, with clinical experience, who are citing their experience along with actual scientific data. Rule of thumb: If you have a source that accusingly says, “Follow the science,” and then doesn’t provide you with original sources to the scientific data, maybe they’re not really credible.

If you’ll recall, Dr. Peter McCullough is a well-respected Texas doctor, who covers the gamut of experience. He teaches. He specializes in cardiology and internal medicine. He sees patients and treats for COVID-19. And he has spent the last year dedicated to treating COVID-19. He has written more peer-reviewed articles on SAR-COV-2 (COVID-19) than anyone else—to date, 47, plus two seminal papers on how to treat COVID-19 to avoid hospitalization and death. He edits two medical journals. So, we’re not talking about “some discredited doctor.”

Dr. Peter McCullough
screenshot from here

When I first heard him, he spoke almost entirely about treatment options—of which there are many, but which are squelched and censored for reasons it’s hard to fathom. He is not an anti-vaxxer—as long as we’re talking about a safe vaccine. However, now he’s starting to come out and say, the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe.

Dr. McCullough says,

The brief update is that we had crushed our curves early in January, before there was any vaccine effect, and we had a nice low plateau through the spring. And then what was born out of vaccination was the Delta variant. And it came out of India after use of the Sinovac vaccine. [Sinovac is a Chinese vaccine.]

And an important analysis from Mayo Clinic and from Boston by Nissan and colleagues has shown that, when more than 25% of the population is vaccinated, it promotes the generation of mutant strains.

Hmm. We have more than half of the population vaccinated now—52% in Texas, higher I believe in the US as a whole.

Dr. McCullough explains that in January we had 14 different strains of the virus. In May we had only 6, but only 2% were Delta. In July—and this presentation was July 30^th—it was 83% Delta.

That’s weird, that other variants are subsumed by this one—unless that’s actually a response to a vaccine over-prevalence.

He does say—unlike the DSHS—that it’s far less dangerous that the original we saw in New York and Milan last year; it’s very responsive to treatment protocols that he recommends, and that many are using around the world with great success. In his practice he says, “I haven’t had anyone close to needing hospitalization. Not like last year.” In another disagreement with DSHS, he notes that the Delta variant is only slightly more infectious—in a test tube; but in human populations it’s not more infectious than the original.

It’s not more contagious, and it’s not more virulent. So, I’m surmising, if you’re being told otherwise, they’re not looking at the actual science, and they’re saying things to instill fear. [The Delta variant Q&A page on the Texas DSHS website, then, isn’t citing the science, but it is instilling fear.] 

All right, the case rate plummeted in January, when very few had yet received the vaccine—about 7%. That means the vaccine was not the cause of the plummet. Likely it was herd immunity from those who had gotten the disease and recovered; that was happening before the vaccine had a chance to cause an effect.

But the more people who got vaccinated, the more issues with the Delta variant. That’s something to think about.

Back in January, Dr. McCullough actually had a high percentage of patients getting the vaccine—on their own; he wasn’t recommending it except in a few of the elderly infirm. But he says,

We had a disturbing signal where we had 186 deaths by January 22^nd certified by the CDC. That was more than the 150 we would expect for a large-scale program like this. And since that time the deaths have skyrocketed. We’re now over 10,000 certified deaths by the CDC.

And last week there was a CMS whistleblower lawsuit filed that extrapolates from CMS data out to potentially 45,000 Americans killed after the vaccine.

And external analysis by McLachlan in London and by Rose in Israel have shown about 50% of the deaths occur within 48 hours, 80% within a week, and 86% have no other explanation.

It looks like the vaccine indeed has caused the death, because the vaccines cause a dangerous production of the spike protein in the body, and some people probably take up too much of the genetic material and have too high a spike of the dangerous protein in their bloodstream. So it’s pathophysiologically possible.

OK, so the vaccines are causing harm. He’s only referring here to deaths. But there are other problems.

Dr. Richard Bartlett, one of the doctors on Senator Hall’s panel, points out that other possible dangers from the vaccine are not even told to patients, so how could they possibly give informed consent—when they aren’t informed? These issues include Guillain-Barré—which is a risk with every vaccine, including the COVID vaccines. And there’s transverse myelitis, myloencephalitis, stroke, heart attack. He doesn’t mention miscarriage and infertility, which Dr. McCullough and others have mentioned elsewhere, and a couple of other things listed on the VAERS website. Anyway, when they leave these things out, they’re not informing you, so you have the ability to give an informed consent.

Back to the Delta issue. Dr. McCullough passes on the report about Israel and elsewhere, where the vaccine has failed to protect against the Delta variant:

So, as we sit here today, now Israel reports that 80% of their cases inferred to be Delta have occurred in those who were fully vaccinated. It’s about 40% of those in the United Kingdom. And now we’re having reports all over the United States that in fact the vaccine has failed. And about half of the patients, indeed, have been fully vaccinated and now they have COVID-19….

It looks like the vaccines almost certainly don’t cover the problem that we have right now, which is the delta variant.

And there’s a great fear that, if we push for a mass vaccination now, that we’ll actually have an increased risk for COVID, because the vaccinated individuals, it looks like they can carry it and spread it. And we see that from four events:

·       One was at a wedding in Houston, Texas, where everybody was vaccinated. 

·       The other one was a plane flight of Democratic lawmakers that flew to Washington. Everyone was vaccinated.

·       Then a large British naval vessel, 3,700 sailors fully vaccinated. [about 100 contracted COVID out of 3,700 crewmembers; all had been fully vaccinated.] 

All of them contracted COVID. We believe it was probably Delta. It was obvious breakthroughs [breakthrough cases are cases after vaccination]. And then a report from Fahrenholtz and colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has shown it, that in fact someone fully vaccinated can indeed get Delta, carry it, and then pass it to someone else. So, vaccinating our health workers and other populations right now is not a wise idea. It’s going to cause more harm than good.

Senator Hall asked a clarifying question about connection between vaccinations and variants: Can the Delta variant be attributed to the vaccine itself? Here’s Dr. McCullough's answer:

That’s correct. And in fact, anytime we put pressure on the population with vaccination, we’re going to spur another variant. We’re seeing a worrisome sign out of California now with the Epsilon variant, and it looks like it’s because of vaccination, too much vaccination with Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. So, if we keep vaccinating the population, we’re going to keep promoting these variants. And our great fear is, sooner or later, we are going to get a stronger variant, and we’re going to be in trouble.

Then the Senator asked about the move back toward mask wearing and social distancing, wondering if that meant government sources know “this vaccine is not really effective on the Delta variant.” Dr. McCullough answers,

I think there’s a general recognition the vaccines are failing.

The one thing that’s clear, though, is that natural immunity is not. There hasn’t been anybody who has natural immunity who’s gotten the Delta variant.

You would hope that would reassure anyone who suffered through and recovered; they have no need for a vaccine—and, he adds, they have “no risk of getting Delta or any other form of COVID.”

One more question from the Senator referred to the presentation earlier in the day from DSHS, claiming that “the immunity level is greater and lasts longer from vaccinations than the natural immunity post COVID”: true or not? Dr. McCullough answers,

No, the CDC had 10,000 breakthrough cases, even with the earlier variants, by the end of April. 10,000 cases. They had zero cases in the naturally immune. So it’s zero versus 10,000. There’s no question that in the United States and elsewhere natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity.

I trust Dr. McCullough. And I can get quite a lot of data and links to studies on his group’s website, AAPSonline.org. I tried finding reference data on the Texas DSHS site; even under resources, where they list every study from the last year, there is only one related to COVID-19, and it’s not very useful. So they make a lot of claims—and you’re just supposed to trust them because they’re the government? Trust doesn’t work that way.

On another interview I heard with Dr. McCullough this week, he talks about three main myths concerning COVID. He lays out several of the myths—a polite word for untruths: 

Dr. Peter McCullough interviewed on the X22 Report

·       That there is asymptomatic spread (see research paper by CAO and another by Madewell), and that there should be testing of asymptomatic people.

·       That masks help stop the spread (12 trials culminated in the DANMASK-19 trial). 

·       That there are no treatments for COVID-19.

He says it’s a myth, known since almost the beginning of the pandemic, that people without symptoms spread the illness. That’s not how it works. If you’ve got symptoms, then you can be shedding. In the very small percentage of people who might have the disease without symptoms, that means their body is building up antibodies against it, and they can’t spread it anyway.

In this segment he also mentions testing of asymptomatic people—which was always a bad idea. The tests weren’t designed for that. They come up with a huge number of false positives when used on people without the disease. In fact, that could account for a large percentage of listed cases, exaggerating the prevalence of the disease. People should never have been tested at all until they got symptoms.

As for masks, he wears them as a doctor, in surgery or in close contact with patients. It’s not really to protect him from them; it’s to protect a patient from the sudden sneeze or cough, which could spread a number of viruses and bacteria. However, the mask (and he’s referring to an N-95 respirator) only filters out.3 microns or larger; the coronavirus is .1 microns. It doesn’t work. And there are studies now that clearly say so.

The issue that is strangest is the refusal to accept that there are many effective treatments. Doctors who treat patients—instead of telling them to wait until they’re sick enough for a hospital—have been using these with great success, and have built up volumes of data. About the prejudice against hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, he points out that there are other medicines—medicines that actually don’t work—and nobody attacks them. A doctor is free to use them on a patient, even though they’re useless. But the historically very safe—and we now know very effective—HCQ and ivermectin are attacked. In some places, HCQ was stockpiled and then not allowed to be used. In one African country, the largest production plant of HCQ outside Taiwan, was burned down. In several places doctors could lose their licenses for treating COVID-19 with these drugs—even if the patient was satisfied that they worked. Why the attacks only on the drugs that work?

Dr. Richard Bartlett
screenshot from here

Dr. Richard Bartlett, from the panel, has been using inhaled budesonide with patients. That drug seems to have gone under the radar and avoided the persecution of some of the others. He referred to two Oxford University randomized controlled trials—the gold standard for science and medicine, using budesonide. These are called the STOIC (STerOids in COVID-19)   trial and the PRINCIPLE trial. These concluded that 90% of hospitalizations, ER visits, and urgent care visits could be prevented with early use of this one medication. In fact, the STOIC trial was shut down early, because it was considered unethical to give a placebo to a patient, risking their death, when there was a known safe and effective treatment.

Dr. Bartlett mentions another study, from the NIH database from 2017; its from the Saudi Journal of Anesthesia. This study showed four ways nebulized budesonide benefited patients on ventilators in the ICU:

·         Their blood oxygen levels will improve.

·         The edema or swelling in the lung tissue reverses.

·         The scarring and remodeling in the lung tissue stops.

·         And the cytokines that they measured plummet in the bloodstream.

He compares the 90% effectiveness of this one drug with the 39% effectiveness of the vaccine—as found in Israel. He says, “I’d say that 90% with just one of those medicines is better than 39% with a vaccine.”

There was one story I thought was very persuasive, giving a human face to the data:

I’ll tell you one case example. In Odessa, Texas, we had a patient that was on 100% oxygen on the ventilator, a PEEP [positive end respiratory pressure] of 16 on the ventilator. Her oxygen saturation was 80%, and when they started budesonide nebulizer treatments three times a day, in one week she was off the ventilator.

The husband had been asked to give hospice orders three times, and he had refused, because his wife made him promise, when she was dropped off at the ER, that they would do everything they could to save her life so she could be here for the children. And so he refused to give the order to let her die and instead pushed back for budesonide. She was off the ventilator in one week, home with her family in two weeks.

And so we have effective early outpatient treatment, but we also have tools that can help people in the emergency room, and we have tools that can help people even if they’re in the ICU with late disease. And so it’s not over till someone stops breathing.

This is all good news. The only bad news is that government sources are lying to us, making things seem worse than they are, building up the vaccines as much safer and more effective than they are, and are otherwise manipulating us.

Dr. McCullough defines propaganda for us (at 8:50 in this interview):

Propaganda is the intentional promotion of false information to influence others.

We need to worry when that's what our government officials are doing, like now.

There’s more we learned from these doctors. Senator Hall summarized his panel’s discussion, with the hope that that truth would take away some of the fear.

Texas State Senator Bob Hall
screenshot from here

In spite of what the media is telling us, and the government as they emphasize how dangerous the Delta variant is, that’s just totally false. It’s false information. It is only slightly more infectious, and it’s certainly far less deadly…. Look at where we are with the death rate. It has stayed flat now for months. And you’re absolutely right when you’ve said that you go back and look when it started to drop in cases, it was well before the vaccine could have had any possible effects. So putting out a piece of information that says that the drop in infections was a result of vaccinations is just false and misleading.

And that for healthy people, it’s really clear, which much has been said, for those who know firsthand in treating people that the risk of the vaccine is far greater than the benefits that might come from it, particularly if you’re a healthy person. That the vaccinations should be aimed at those people that are high risk with other morbidities, extenuating factors, and certainly not children.

And that there have been clearly demonstrated, with what’s happened out there, not just here in Texas but in other states, that there are safe, inexpensive, and effective treatments for the COVID symptoms that have been proven to work, and so that there’s actually no need for having a vaccine.

Senator Hall lists some of the untruths spoken by DSHS earlier in the day:

The one where it said the vaccine is undeniably needed to prevent the spread of COVID.  Think the data shows that the vaccine had nothing to do with stopping it but could possibly have everything to do with prolonging it right now.

That the known benefits from the vaccine far outweigh known risk. That’s absolutely—the data does not support that. It’s just the opposite. The risk is much higher with the vaccine.

And that they are amazingly safe and effective. I think the data, the number of people that have died, particularly the problems and the health of younger folks, is, they are not safe, and what we’re seeing is they have little to no effect. That the natural immunity is what is getting us out of this.

He makes a final recommendation that I found interesting, and hadn’t thought of:

I don’t know about what you will do, but I can tell you, if I or a member of my family were to see a doctor on COVID and be tested positive, and they would tell me, go home, take a couple of aspirin, and come back if you get a little sicker—which have been told to a number of people, and is still being told, based on the phone calls I’ve gotten recently—I will tell you, I would take the step of reporting them for malpractice to the Texas Medical Board. I think the same thing that was being done to doctors that were using hydroxychloroquine early on. Because we need all of our medical community to step up on this.

There was more. I encourage listening to the presentations yourself, and consider finding and reading the data. Asking questions, seeking the truth, and making a judgment call on when you’ve found it are things we all really need to do. I wouldn’t categorically refuse to believe a government source—if they can show you the data to back up what they’re saying. But I wouldn’t simply take their word for it. That hasn’t gone well for us this past year and a half. It probably never did, but this got our attention.

Lies Become the Narrative

Andrew Klavan, the other day, was talking about what happens when you face continual lies. He started with an example of a young woman he encountered many years ago who kept lying. After long hours of continual lies, he faced a sort of warped sense of reality:

Andrew Klavan, Episode 1028
screenshot from here

I found that I was living inside her lies. So, it’s not exactly that I was starting to believe her; it’s that I was starting to react as if what she said was true, because I was debating with her what disease she had when she had no disease.

And the reason for that is, I’m not insane. It takes an insane person to think that every single thing he’s being told is a lie. Right? To think that you’re living in the matrix, or a simulation, you know, is the kind of thing a crazy person believes. And yet, right now we are effectively living in a simulation—created by this massive telecommunications media empire that the left has assembled; the woke businesses that have taken on being part of the oligarchy the government wants to form; and the government officials were being backed up by the media.

So we’re kind of living in this matrix. And you have to be insane to think that that’s true—and yet it is true.

I spend a certain amount of energy trying to understand people who believe things I know to be lies. I don’t think I’m better at discerning outright lies in normal life situations than the next person. Maybe I’m less skilled. As a truth teller, I tend to go into a situation with the assumption someone is telling me the truth face-to-face. When that isn’t true, it kind of twists my gut, and I have to puzzle it out, maybe re-prove what I know to be true.

I’ve been fascinated for a couple of years by people who “read body language,” for lack of a better way of saying that. There’s this website, and this group on YouTube for example. They aren’t exactly lie detectors, but they can tell better than most of us what someone’s body is telling about what that person is thinking or feeling. These places teach their skills; next time I’m ready to put in about enough time to learn a new language, I may have to dive in, instead of just observe and marvel at what they do.

But Andrew Klavan’s explanation struck me. People aren’t exactly crazy for believing the crazy things they believe; they’re acting like a sane person acts when they have been repeatedly lied to by someone in authority.

One example he showed was a clip of a congresswoman in California, commenting about her nine-year-old daughter, whose thought about climate change was, “The earth is on fire, and we’re all going to die soon.” Why does the nine-year-old believe the earth is on fire when, other than the occasional brush fire or forest fire (which, granted, do significant damage in California every year or two), the earth is not on fire? Why does she assume the entire population of the earth, all of us, are going to die soon? For a nine-year-old, I’m assuming “soon” means maybe before she gets to enjoy adulthood. Let’s say twelve years—since that has been a repeated time frame of impending doom since the 1960s. This girl wasn’t even alive to hear Al Gore predict it various times—all over 12 years ago. But she may have heard AOC or Greta Thunberg—another young girl who only believes it because she has been told to believe it. Most likely she had her mother and teachers lie to her.

Is that nine-year-old girl crazy? No. Klavan says,

In order for her nine-year-old to say, “All the adults around me are lying and making stuff up,” that would be nuts. That would actually be a mentally disturbed child. But this is a sane child, so she believes all the lies she’s being told.

But here’s what happens, Klavan says, every time we have to address a lie:

Fighting back against these lies makes the lie the narrative…. If you have to defend the fact that police shootings aren’t a problem, police shootings become the narrative.

Klavan showed a Fox News clip of a professor, Eric Kaufman, who had done a university-funded survey in which they had asked people, “Which is the more likely cause of death for young black men in America? Is it car accident? Or is it to be shot by police?” The actual verifiable statistics show that death by car accident is 10-fold more likely. But he mentioned these groups of people who believe death by police bullet is more likely:

·         80% of African-American Biden voters.

·         70% of whites who believe Republicans are racist.

Klavan follow up with:

The lies become the narrative. And the narrative distorts the way you look at things. And then the way you look at things distorts your politics.

I took occasion to read the Democrat platform once, a few years ago. I expected—and of course found—multiple things where I simply didn’t agree, because, as we know, government interference tends to bring about unintended consequences that are likely to be the exact opposite of the stated objective. But what surprised me was how many policies were based on verifiable lies: about climate change being the biggest existential problem, about racism being a systemic problem with no evidence of improvement, about abortion being about a woman’s bodily autonomy and not about the additional living human being they cheer about snuffing out, about tribal victimization—such as skin color, sex, LGBTQ status—being the determining factor in who should control others.

In fact,

·       Women do not make $.70 for every $1.00 a man makes—once you take into account multiple variables, not least of which is women’s choices.

·       A minimum wage is not expected to be a living wage; it is entry level, to give experience—a contractual agreement made illegal by a minimum wage law, thus eliminating work for those who can’t yet bring in that high minimum of value to the employer.

·       Blacks do not need to live in fear of murder by police. Even the handful of annual cases where blacks suffer death by police show causes other than racism—even when the officer is at fault. Note that the Derek Chauvin case did not even bring evidence of racism to the courtroom—because the prosecution had no such evidence—even though that was the supposed basis for months of rioting in Minneapolis and around the country.

·       Blacks do not suffer systemic racism from everyone else in society; they suffer much less than during Democrat-caused Jim Crow laws; they suffer far, far less than under Democrat slave owners. Only racists care about race anymore; the rest of us care about character.

·       Black Lives Matter is an international Marxist organization, bent on the overthrow of self-governing people and any pillars of civilization those people have built—in particular the intact mother-father family, the destruction of which has caused more damage to black communities than any other.

·       America was not founded on slavery; it was founded on “all men are created equal,” and then began the task of living up to that ideal after millennia of slavery, including a few hundred years of whites enslaving blacks.

·       Climates change. No amount of draconian de-industrialization will change that in any measurable way. But a single volcanic eruption could wipe out a half century’s worth of lowered carbon emissions. (Note: If you read scriptures, dire world-ending events are much more likely to result from rebellion against God than from driving a gasoline fueled vehicle. But if you really have faith in lowered CO2, then, be my guest and show your faith by going back to horse-drawn transportation.)

·       Abortion isn’t healthcare, and it isn’t about a woman’s choices concerning her own body; it is killing living, human offspring.

·       Men and women are biologically different.

·       Married mother and father give children a better chance to grow up safe, protected, educated, and nurtured than any other institution or program could possibly do.

·       Criminals do not obey gun laws. And self-defense is a God-given right. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent crimes.

The list could go on. You get the idea. Let’s add a couple we’ve learned this past year:

·       Virus spread isn’t prevented by wearing a cloth mask, wearing a mask outside, wearing a mask while also social distancing, wearing a mask when you have immunity from having the virus or getting vaccinated. And viruses don’t magically stop spreading once you’re eating or “protesting.”

·       Treatments have been available for over a year now to reduce and relieve symptoms: hydroxychloroquine along with zinc and zithromycin; ivermectin; increased amounts of Vitamin D and probably Vitamin C and other immune system boosters—all of which you weren’t allowed to say on social media, and many doctors were prevented from sharing.

·       Science does not say schools should close, or businesses should be forced to shutter, or churches should be disallowed—even outside in parking lots. And we now have reliable evidence that some scientists are just as capable of lying as other humans. We also have evidence that scientists have no business forming public policy.

·       Our God-given rights should never be infringed. Any time they are, that is tyranny—even during an “emergency.” If all it took was an emergency to take away our God-given rights, governments would simply declare perpetual emergencies.     

Who is doing all this lying? People we were raised to believe we could believe: elected officials, their appointees, academia. “NBC lies to them. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Coca-Cola, Delta, Disney.”

And why are they lying? Klavan speculates that it’s to cover up for their failed policies. He’s likely right about that:

You know what it’s like, it’s like a cigarette maker telling us the crisis we have in this country is not enough cough drops. You know, “Oh, you’re coughing up blood? Dammit, you know, it’s the cough drop companies. We have got to do something about the cough drop companies. Have a cigarette, and I’ll get right on it.” That’s what this is like. An entire power structure, we’re surrounded by an entire power structure whose policy failures, and whose incredible debt, and whose moral failures have made it necessary for them to distract us from their increasing power and wealth by turning us against one another. We are living inside their lies.

One question that ought to come up is, how do I know they’re lying and I’m not just wrong? Evidence is one thing. And once evidence of lying comes up a time or two from a particular source, you start looking skeptically at everything that source says. Sometimes it’s worth digging up the actual facts—when you can find reliable sources. (Fact checkers can be liars too, and most are.) Sometimes the liars ought to just be disregarded.

Except that you have to fight them, because they’re trying to brainwash our children, and they’re trying to take away our ability to get and share actual facts, and they’re trying to do damage to our ability to make a living and buy and sell and associate—the things people do in a thriving civilization. So we have to fight the lies, and not just ignore them.

image found here

But, if combatting the lies puts us in the position of making their lies the narrative, the real question is, how do you combat the lies—and the narrative they engender?

Klavan suggests living in truth. Embody the truth. He doesn’t mean just shouting truth louder. He doesn’t even mean run for school board or attend school board meetings—although you should do that too. It comes down to treating others truthfully—being who you really are. Be kind. Be wise. Be generous. Be caring. So that the lies they tell about you don’t ring true to anyone who knows you personally.

I’ll add, if you feel the need to point to your black friends to show you’re not racist, you’re doing it wrong. Your denials won’t prove who you are; rather, it validates the accusation. But the way you actually treat people, all the time, just might prove who you are.

And also speak the truth. After all, the people you’re speaking truth to aren’t demented; they’re deceived. And for many of them, at some point they will question that matrix they’re in; then they’ll step out of the lies and into truth—where we welcome them.

The Choice Is between Freedom and Coercion

There are some things we think are self-evident, such as that we our endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (which includes owning property).

But a whole lot of what was obvious, or self-evident, up until recently may not be so obvious today.

Here at the Spherical Model, we make the assumption that the good things we’re going for are freedom, prosperity, and civilization—rather than the alternatives of tyranny, poverty, and savagery. The choice seems obvious.

And yet there are many people who literally do not value freedom. It may be that they’ve had it redefined out of existence, like so many other truths. But I thought we might do a bit of awareness raising on freedom today.

Here’s how I define terms, using my 1980 Webster’s Dictionary combined with my words: 

Freedom: absence of hindrance, restraint, confinement, repression. In the political sense, it is ownership of one’s own life and the production of wealth and property that results from one’s use of life and effort. A government should protect the freedoms of life, liberty, and property; it does not grant these things, but protects them from infringement. A government that takes life, liberty, or property unjustly—when the person has not unlawfully infringed on those rights of another person—that is a tyrannical government, which is the opposite of freedom.

Political freedom means living in a society in which our God-given rights are protected rather than infringed. These would include freedoms of belief and expression, such as freedom of religion and freedom of the press, as well as freedoms of property and security, such as freedom from illegal searches and seizures and the right to bear arms.

Liberty: synonym of freedom. It is ownership of one’s own life, to pursue as one chooses, and to enjoy the fruits of one’s efforts. No person or government or other entity owns a person or controls how the person pursues happiness.

And yet, in today’s world, we have a rising generation that favors a change from our system of freedom to a tyranny they might call socialism, without knowing what that means either.

There’s another term that is useful here: Agency. Sometimes we combine it with the word free, as in free agency. You’ve probably encountered it when sports professionals leave a team and become free agents, open to a contract with another team. That might be the limit of how you've used it. But it implies the ability to choose. So you can see that agency is related to liberty.

There are various words we use as opposites to the ability to choose: coercion, oppression, tyranny.

When you look at a political ideology, you can simplify the search for the good and true by looking at its closeness to freedom, liberty, ability to choose—or by how dangerously close it is to coercion, oppression, tyranny.

·         Do you get to believe what you choose to believe?

·         Do you get to choose your profession and way of life?

·         Do you get to speak your opinions freely?

·         Do you get to associate with people you choose to associate with?

·         Do you get to enjoy the fruits of your own labors?

It wouldn’t be very convincing to offer you a truthful opposite, such as: “Wouldn’t you rather believe what we the powerful tell you to believe?” Or “Wouldn’t it be better for you if we the powerful decided what work you were allowed to do and for what pay?” Or “Wouldn’t it be better if you were allowed to speak only the words we the powerful told you to?” Or, “Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if you gave us all your earnings and we the powerful dole them out to those we favor?”

No, it has to be done more subtly than that:

·       Let’s stop others from believing things that we believe are just wrong—shut down churches, political groups, nonprofits, businesses, schools, or any individual or organization that does or says things we don’t like.

·       Let’s stop others from making a living in ways we don’t like—like using fossil fuels, or maybe just because the business owners believe things we don’t like.

·       Let’s cancel or coerce others to make them stop hurting us by saying things we don't believe—because their words are violence.

·       Let’s take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, like us, who are more deserving.

You get the idea. To someone with some enlightenment, the “progressive” or “woke” or “socially just” way is pretty dark. It takes away individual choice. It oppresses individuals. It rules over people tyrannically. If that’s OK with you as long as they’re on your side, not only is that evil of you, but it’s also just a matter of time until the powers-that-be come after you for some perceived infraction.

It’s a continuation of a very old war—a war that predates earth history. It’s a war between good and evil, between light and dark. I told this story here.   

Let me tell another old story that maybe we can apply. Versions of it show up in fantasy literature all the time. It’s from the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, chapter 13 mostly. But I’ll be retelling it in a slightly more narrative form.

"La Bete de la Mer" tapestry in France, depicting
John the Revelator observing the dragon and the sea beast
image from Wikipedia

There is an evil force, in the form of a dragon, who is a scourge to all the earth. He is an enemy to light, goodness. He doesn’t build; he destroys. Chaos and coercion are his right- and left-hand weapons. He controls two monsters, hideous in form and function, who do his bidding. One monster comes up from the depths of the waters over all the earth. She is filthiness and all the worldly evils, and she rides and controls the powers of rulers and organizations over all the earth. She seduces them with power, and brings them together in secret oaths, so that they simultaneously threaten and support one another in their schemes to amass greater and greater power, buying and selling the souls of men.

The other monster comes up from the earth. Its form appears much less dangerous than the dragon, but it speaks with the tongue of the dragon. It voices the dragon’s words, which are lies. Some call it the false prophet. Another interpretation might be propaganda. It can be found flowing out of ivory and other towers, in and through the airways—redefining in the dragon’s lying lexicon what is “good” and persuading people to worship the dragon, along with his beasts.

The dragon and his forces will eventually lose in their efforts to harm and destroy all the people of the earth. Bur for now the dragon marshals his forces, stirring them up to larger and louder attacks, knowing his time is short.

What does it mean? Revelation, told in a sort of symbolic dream form, can be confusing. But suppose it does say that there will come a time when the organizations of the earth make secret agreements with one another in an effort to amass power? Is that happening? I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory; it's not theory. You might try checking these out for a sample: here, here, here, here, and here.

And about that propaganda monster—that seems like a good explanation of how:

Rioters tear down statue of
Father Junipero Serra in CA
screenshot from here

·       Religion becomes “bad,” but lasciviousness and licentiousness become “good.”

·       Treating all lives as equally valuable becomes “racist,” but favoring a particular race above all others is “social justice.”

·       An elderly friend who suggests florists who could help service a same-sex “wedding” when her religion prevents her becomes “intolerant,” but taking away that woman’s business and savings for so doing is done in the name of “tolerance.”

·       Speaking reasoned opinions with data to back them up becomes “hate speech,” but shouting down a speaker for even holding different opinions is supporting “free speech.”

·       Honoring a free nation and its flag is “hateful,” but disrespecting the flag and tearing down monuments is understandable, considering the circumstances.

You get the idea. Look at the news. Almost every story will provide an example.

The lies appeal to a certain uncivilized human characteristic: selfishness. If they’re working on you, or on someone you know, selfishness is an underlying factor, often disguised as “this makes me feel virtuous,” so you won’t look carefully enough to notice the lies.

Whether or not these are the times described in Revelation, the description seems fitting for today. We may not know how each episode will turn out, but we do know how the story ends.

In the meantime, let’s see how much loving truth-telling we can do to rescue those who might want the light of freedom, prosperity, and civilization if only they could see it.