Reddit has, in r/philosophy, a post saying "escape the echo chamber.  Here is my response. 

Rather simplistic. The extrapolation is that the "other guys" are actually right and if you agree with those around you, are, or become wrong. There is a valid argument for objective truth and validity of a position. If a person actively tries to think critically about their position and can rationally defend it, it is indeed a position not an opinion. This proposed argument applies only and in a limited fashion to emotionally based ideas and causes. like identity politics, where hatred, or love of a person trumps valid rational argument. Then it does become an echo chamber. When discussion centers on an objective set of values, like those in the Bill of Rights, one has to truly stretch to take a radical stance. If the rights of free speech exist, or the right to privacy and security "in one's papers and possessions" is the law, then there is no alternate position that is rationally based. The assumption of that irrationally based opinion allows for the echo chamber phenomenon. indeed, it requires such behavior to allow people to maintain that opinion. If the law of the land that can only be changed by a Constitutional Convention of States says something is the law, only an echo chamber can stand in opposition, and one only need look at the US today to see that happening. When political fads become the stance of the ruling party, and demonization of both the law and those who support it become the accepted norm, it is the echo chamber writ large. We are in it now.

History lesson they won't teach in school

Subject:

Our President and Family

History 101

Here is the story;

Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia, had three children: Hunter, Beau and Naomi.

In 1972, Neilia and Naomi, died in a car accident.

Joe eventually married a woman named Jill (his current wife).

He already knew her because she had been Hunter's babysitter at the time of the car accident. (Yeah, THAT seems normal- marry the babysitter).                                                           They had a daughter named Ashley. Ashley lives 'a quiet life' and is frequently in and out of rehab for various substance abuse issues.

Now sadly, the sanest, most normal one of the 3 surviving kids, Beau, dies in 2015 from a brain tumor. He had been married to Haillie and they had 2 children, a boy and a girl named Natalie, who was 11 yrs old when her dad died.

 

Enter Hunter Biden, in 2015, to "comfort" his brother's widow. Mind you, Hunter is married at the time, to Kathleen Biden, since 1993. He starts                                                           screwing around with his dead brother's wife in 2015...his wife Kathleen finds out about it and they separate. Hunter moves in with his dead brother's wife, Haillie,and her two kids and they have a grand old time.

He ultimately gets divorced from Kathleen in 2017.

Meanwhile, he starts screwing around with a stripper, while still shacking up with his dead brother's wife, before his divorce is finalized, and gets the stripper pregnant Haillie kicks his butt to the curb supposedly for this indiscretion in 2018.

Hunter_Biden_Stripper_Baby_Lunden_Alexis

He denies the stripper's baby is his, although a paternity test proves otherwise and eventually he marries a woman named Melissa in 2019 after                                                           knowing her for 6 days...

hunter%20and%20melissa%20cohen-157432788

Does the tale end there? Why no, no it doesn't.

That just sets the stage...

Enter the laptop from hell..loaded with emails, text messages, photos, child pornography, videos, and other sordid digital images of drug use and rampant weirdness....

Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off in Delaware, his home state, to get it repaired. It seems he dropped it in some water while in a meth-induced state of mind. He then neglected to pay the $85.00 repair fee and the laptop became the repair shop owner's property for non-payment. When the owner saw what was on it, he was so disturbed that he contacted the FBI. No response. The DOJ? No response. Eventually, it landed in Rudy Giuliani's possession and he turned it over to the Delaware State Police AFTER making 4 copies of the hard drive. Turns out, there's quite a lot of child pornography on there...much of it involving children on Hunter's many trips to China.

The Chinese Communist Party uses this as a blackmail tactic... They supply the young girls, they film you,                                                           unknowingly, and then they can keep you "in line", while paying you the big $$$ to do their bidding, like lucrative deals with your VP father.

Millions of dollars were paid to Hunter Biden for favors with the US Govt while Joe Biden was VP under Obama.

For 8 years Hunter made the contacts and split the money with his                                                           father, referred to as the "Big Guy" in all emails detailing how their ill-gotten gains would be split up amongst all the criminals involved.

Joe Biden sold out his country and used his meth head son to do it. ...

But, IT GETS WORSE Today, on the laptop, emails were released between Beau Biden's widow, Haillie, and Joe Biden in 2017 and more in 2018 when she and Hunter were still living together. They were casually talking about the continual "sexually inappropriate behavior" she had witnessed from Hunter toward her 14                                                           year-old daughter, Natalie, HIS NIECE!

She told Joe that she felt she had put her children in a dangerous situation by getting involved with Hunter Biden. Joe knew his son was screwing around with his niece and he advised his daughter-in-law to go to therapy.....No one went to the police and the abuse escalated. THAT is the main reason she broke off her relationship with Hunter. Among the pictures of Hunter having                                                           sex with young Asian children, there were hundreds of provocative pictures of a 14 year old girl, mainly topless, and hundreds more of Hunter Biden, in sexual poses with her, HIS NIECE. She was 14 yrs old and HE WAS 48!!

THE END.....but, is it? Nope. Rudy says there is more to come, primarily                                                           involving Joe Biden getting rich off laundering foreign money through our country, using his son as intermediary. Biden is as dirty and crooked as they come. Hillary looks clean compared to him. Now it makes sense why Obama REFUSED to endorse him as the DNC candidate                                                           until he was the last man standing!

 

Now do you really think Hunter will ever go to prison? 

 

 

 

 

Pandemic Opens Doors for Nurses' Unions

I am a retired RN, 40 years , mostly in ICU and Critical Care units. I did do a stint as a manager, so can see the issue from both sides. My position is that there is nothing to push hospitals to care about anything but profit for their shareholders. I am not a fan of Managed Health Care for profit. Managed Health Care itself is a fairly defensible idea. Medicine for profit is not and never will be a good idea. Ethically speaking, profiting from human suffering is unethical and immoral. Making a profit is not itself a bad thing, but having profit as the goal for any healthcare organization or unit is unacceptable. 

The real problem in healthcare is structural. The sole unit of production (what the company actually sells or provides) is NURSING CARE. If doctors could do everything in their offices they would do so. The only unique service that the hospital provides that cannot be replaced is nursing care. This is why doctors send patients to hospitals, this is what actually keeps patients alive. Just ask any 2nd or 1st year intern who has relied on nurses to keep him from making potentially disastrous mistakes in a 3 am sleepless shift. You will not find any doctor who would even try to set up and maintain 4-5 different cardiopulmonary systemic infusions and calculate their titration to arterial and Swan Ganz line readings and a ventricular pressure measuring bolt inserted into the skull of the patient while monitoring 2-3 chest tubes, urinary output and respiratory status and maintaining a ventilator. All of this while keeping the patient clean and dressings clean and changed regularly, inserting peripheral IVs and dealing with patient and family anxiety. Until you have done this for two straight shifts with no breaks or anything to eat and have to go home and come back in after only 8 hours to do it all again, you have no idea what nurses deal with. Keep in mind that the nurse in question also may have another one or even two other patients to take care of and is worrying about his or her own exposure to disease or infection. And they have to document EVERYTHING they do and why 

It is arguably one of the worst jobs on the planet, unless you are the particularly selfless and hardened personality that takes on this kind thing as a challenge and a beloved way of life. Like auto racing, the adrenaline high is pretty intoxicating. Most Nurses will tell you that "just getting through the shift without anything disastrous happening" is a true victory. Now you may understand why the high burnout rate exists in nursing . Unfortunately, Hospitals, Nursing Homes and other Healthcare organizations look at nurses as expendable and easily replaced. No one cars for the caregiver. This is why Nurses need advocates, and so far no one has stepped up to do so. Therefore, unions have become possibly the last line of defense against a complete collapse of the healthcare system. 

The second and possibly core problem with Healthcare is that it is not run by the people who actually know what is needed, how things are done and have some expertise in the running of the system. Business and Hospital Administrations are full of MBAs whose sole bible is the bottom line, keeping staffing low as possible and ignoring anything but profit for the shareholder. Nurses should be making these decisions, not beancounters whose conscience was surgically removed during their graduate studies. Doctors are clients, and it makes about as much sense to have one of them in charge administratively as to have engineers who never drove a car, never ran an assembly line or ever designed a vehicle in charge of GM. If this structural deficiency is not corrected, Healthcare may well collapse sooner rather than later, Doctors do procedures, examine and diagnose patients and write orders. They do not and most cannot do direct patient care, as witnessed in studies where medical students tried to function as nurses, and failed dismally. It is apples and oranges. 

Are traditional unions the answer? I don't know and have my doubts. Nursing needs some novel form of national advocacy, collective bargaining and protection under law, or there will be no nurses, and a lot of people will die needlessly. It is that dire. The present abuse of nursing cannot be sustained. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/health/covid-health-workers-unions.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210128&instance_id=26537&nl=the-morning&regi_id=133856679&segment_id=50580&te=1&user_id=37f87df980a5d33c0706ba74f21e2042

Democrats send. 3 Trillion dollars to other countries.

 I listened to a speech by a republican representative. He discussed the recent military spending bill that includes funds to be sent to the IMF. Several million dollars go  directly to China,Iran and Syria. Yes, the Democrats are sending money, our tax dollars, to enemies of the USA. I for one, would like an explanation from Congress . It appears our country is literally under attack by our own government. 

We have people dying of hunger in Appalachia, veterans homeless and dying on the streets, covid was brought in from the 3rd world countries and Democrats want to open our borders to the worst infected populations and give illegal aliens the resources that are desperately needed for our own citizens. Obama and Biden have both indicated their intent to put America last. Obama felt we should dismiss the Constitution and allow the UN to make policy decisions for us. Gore forced and connived the NAFTA agreement that cost us over half the jobs in the US over a decade that went overseas. Obama forced shutdown of businesses from oil refineries to lead smelting plants and pharmaceutical producers, all went over seas, taking jobs with them and making America dependent on foreign countries that really don't like us nor do they have our best interests in mind. 

Biden is beholden to China and Xi's Communist Party. His son has received literally millions of dollars from them, and now Biden allowed them access to our power grid, cybernet security and potentially the control of multiple industry networks. Literally, China can shut us down whenever they want. Biden, in a petty attack on Trumps legacy, has destroyed 70,000 US jobs 11,000 the first day of his presidency. There is no way to spin that. 

Biden happily destroying the country

 Day 4 of the Biden administration has seen oer 70,000 lost jobs, the undermining of the effort to stop child trafficking by gutting ICE and the Border Patrol ( in the name of preserving families, knowing full well that the VAST majority of the children at the border were bought for sexual slavery by the Cartels) cutting the pipeline that would help keep us energy independent and ensure jobs that cannot be replaced, impeachment proceedings against Trump, who was already impeached falsely for the very things Biden actually did and bragged about doing, and continued lack of acknowledgement of the rioters in Portland, while condemning conservatives for protesting against a stolen election. If I read this in a book, I would have a difficult time with suspension of disbelief. 

With all that, the country cannot deliver either relief to the people the Democrats have put out of work, support healthcare workers who are being treated like Chinese forced laborers by hospital administrations and nursing home administrations, or stop giving money to foreign countries that hate us. All the while, giving free shit to illegal aliens, denying service to Veterans living on the streets and dying homeless and assaulting the international gains Trump made while returning to the policies that destroyed our international credibility under Obama. It is almost beyond belief. 

The real fear among people loyal to our country is that the globalists will carry out their plans to turn over policy control to the UN, bypass the Constitution by Executive Orders and eliminate protections granted by the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting "domestic terror", a euphemism for conservative opposition to  socialist policies. However, violent riots, murder of police and occupation of public property by BLM and Antifa go unchecked. The media don't even pretend to deliver the news anymore, and ignore newsworthy stories to present "the narrative". It is like the DNC decided 1984 was a good idea. 

 Marco Rubio, not a recent favorite of mine, actually came out today with a decent comment on the Pedo-in-Chief's latest round of exec orders bypassing any checks and balances, the Congress, and of course advancing the globalist socialist cause at the expense of literally thousands of US jobs. Unity at its finest, right?

https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1352600933365112832/video/1.

 I had heard of blue jet lightening from some pilots I knew, but this is the first explanation I have seen: space-station-detectors-found-source-weird-blue-jet-lightning

There are other forms of electrical displays that are generally seen only by high altitude pilots like ELFs and a glowing foglike apparition one guy calls Wispies. These seem not to be related to the level of aurora borealis phenomenon which depend on charged particles streaming from the sun and interacting with the Earths magnetic field.  I will keep looking to see what else I can find on the various high atmosphere electrical phenomenon pilots and weather watchers have reported. 

Thanks for reading. 

two seasons of gardening

I took these two pictures, one this spring, the other today, Jan 22,2021. I designed and put in the garden as an anniversary present for my wife, an ardent gardener. I put down landscape fabric, B1 stone and cement blocks, then cut 55 gal drums lengthwise and drilled a drain hole in the bottom, put them on the blocks and filled them with 3 parts potting mix to one part mushroom compost and 1 cup vermiculite. One of my beehives is visible in the upper left of the bottom picture. 

Rescue Dogs why you need one.

Because You Care is an incredibly effective shelter, not only taking local strays, dog and cat, but they take in dogs from a Kentucky shelter that are up for euthanasia, a euphamism for about to be killed because nobody wants them. These dogs and cats are fostered to a network of selfless and kindhearted volunteers who allow the shelter to care for many many more animals than they would be able to if limited to their physical location only. You may not be able top change the whole world, but you can change the whole world for a dog or cat who desperately needs someone to love and care for them. Contact BYC and volunteer, foster, adopt or just help play with and walk these dogs and cats. You may make the whole world of difference for a rescue animal who has never known a loving home. Rescue animals are the best pets, and the most loving and loyal.

first Wolfspeak

 There is little in the world that is really new, and the old adage "those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it" has a lot of application today. Right now there are contradictory reports about the invasion of the Capitol. The FBI stated that they knew the incursion was being planned but did not explain their not sharing that information with other LE agencies, including the Capitol Police. This can explain Speaker Pelosi's shady and probably unconstitutional push to rush through an impeachment vote. If she knew that the FBI report made it plain that Trump's speech did not incite the incursion, then her actions, rash as they appear, make perfect sense. Furthermore, reports of the leaders and planners of this attack being members of Antifa and BLM, including at least one sus[ect arrested by the FBI, then the whole story of this being related to Trump falls apart. 

What does this have to do with history repeating itself? On 27 February 1933,  a fire broke out at the German Legislative House, the Reichstag. Who set it was never definitively determined, and both the Nazi Party and the Communist Party were blamed. In any case, the Nazis took full advantage of the manufactured public outrage to nearly eliminate all their opponents, and even set up a puppet "opposition" in the legislature, leading to the Third Reich and all its infamy. The observant person cannot help but see the parallels to what the Democrats in Congress are doing. The reason for the unheard-of late impeachment is obvious. They want to prevent Trump from being reelected in 2024, a very real possibility. Secondly, they know that they did not win a decisive victory and that they could lose both houses of Congress in 2022 as well as losing a lot of local governmental positions. 

So, they are taking a playbook from the Nazis in 1933, striking while the iron is hot and trying to take Trump out of the picture permanently, undermine the "loyal opposition in Congress" while setting up a cadre of pliable Republicans to act as an "opposition" while not actually opposing the liberal agenda. Part of this is to convince the general public that they are in danger from a nonexistent far right radical army that will spread violence over the country and even try to reverse the 2020 election by claiming fraud , corruption, and illegal election manipulation, and yes, cheating. The fact that this did happen, and is documented makes no difference. The fix is in.

Whether Pelosi, Schumer, and the DNC actually read the history of the rise of the Third Reich is immaterial. It happened, and without some serious intervention, will happen again. I suggest doing some reading on the post Reichstag rise of Adolf Hitler ( his real name at birth was  Schikelgruber, by the way, obviously he had to change that name) to the rule of the German Republic. The rest is history.