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Well, we all have to be asking at this point like the classic Mitchell and Webb skit, "Are we (the US) the baddies?"

https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU

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I think the infected and recovered numbers are way under reported at this point. Everyone I know has had the virus in the last two weeks.

No one I know sought medical attention or even public testing. Everyone here is using Amazon test kits. So the government has no clue that everyone I know has had the virus.

And if everyone I know got it over the holidays -- does everyone else have that same experience?

And if so, then just about everyone has had it at this point.

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Justice Thomas will. Not sure of any of the rest. Even some of the smart ones seem weak willed to me. I pray I’m wrong.

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Mark, anyone who has ever written for a living or has been expected to write regularly will know what you are talking about. Sometimes your brain just needs time to process information in the background so it can be properly organized for you to analyze and present. It often seems like overload but in reality it is just your brain saying "give me some time" and then kicking into subconscious processing mode for awhile. I'm sure you know this, too. It is a normal and healthy part of the writing process.

I suspect many days and weeks such as this will occur during the coming year for all of us, with a lot of disparate and elliptical information for us to process. It is going to be a demanding, chaotic, event-filled, and portentous time. I very much appreciate that you are one of those taking the time to help your readers make sense of all of this. We need all of the good minds and good communicators we can get during this time. Thank you.

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Thanks. Yes, I suspect you're right about this coming year.

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"Regime change begins at home", said the Bush II era bumper sticker.

Exactly backward, of course. Regime change at home is the endgame.

https://www.revolver.news/2020/09/meet-norm-eisen-legal-hatchet-man-and-central-operative-in-the-color-revolution-against-president-trump/

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Adding to our "malaise" (I know that I am sick and tired of being sick and tired) it appears the CDC is now ready to begin using its "police power" to force quarantine and isolation. Further, it would seem that the State of Washington is meeting this week to potentially discuss a bill that would "Authorize [a] ‘Strike Force’ To ‘Involuntarily Detain’ Unvaccinated Families: ‘They Have Already Set Up The Internment Camps,’" according to GP. I, for one, will not be making my way to Washington state.

This is not hyperbole, this is fact--as the hair sniffer likes to say, and there have been many discussions about where that line in the sand may be: I believe this is the line that when crossed is the beginning of the end. The Australian model of rounding people up and putting them in internment camps just ain't gonna fly here. I really don't know what they are smoking in Faucistan to think this was somehow a good idea, and that we would just go along with it.

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Gekk, i can't imagine American patriots allowing internment camps to be built in their vicinity. That would justify mobs, torches, pitchforks etc... I think it was Max Igan who outlined some months ago how easy it would be to disrupt and disable these kind of camps and their web of support systems. Food deliveries, transport for prisoners and camp personnel, power and water supply, roads and bridges, staffing protection, vendors and contractors needed to run/ maintain the place... We've seen what mischief the amateurish BLMTIFA types can do. Now consider what even a handful of ex military could dream up. Camps are an absolute no go.

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I hope you are right. Part of the effectiveness of this totalitarian stuff is that it depends on being so outrageous and such a departure from the normal that nobody believes it until too late. Yet it is out there and it is happening - look at Australia. Once a penal colony, once again becoming a penal colony - and yet a high percentage of its citizens seem to have no context for or objection to what is happening. It is already way past time for people to wake up.

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Dissonant1 you remind me of what McCullough said about how the pandemic cut off communications and isolated doctors so they no longer had the opportunities to collaborate and share ideas. The totalitarianism crept up, but not really if you were finding ways to look outside the US.

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Jan 9, 2022·edited Jan 9, 2022

Mark, I believe many of us are in overload this week. Between what is going on in my own household, which I am wondering (without hysteria) might be due to my husband’s Covid shots early last year (I did not have them for my own medical reasons) and the craziness on full public display in the Supreme Court, plus the ever more frightening Merrick Garland, in true villain mode… my head is befogged. I have never believed that Affirmative Action justices Sotomayor and Kagen were the best and the brightest, and Breyer is just an old pol in a robe. Garland is a spite-filled little man who has missed the brass ring insofar as the SCOTUS is concerned, and is now having to juggle the horrible conflict of interest he has - his son-in-law getting rich off of peddling CRT texts to the schools across our country while Garland tries to prosecute those parents who protest just that. This is the kind of stuff that makes sane people begin to wish for lightning bolts to come down and clear the decks.

I read that they are now employing the traveling nurses - the ones who filled in huge gaps in places like NYC and New Orleans when the first Covid surge overwhelmed their hospitals. When our local paper speaks of hospitals being overwhelmed it is because of staff burnout. And staff diminishment. Yet they still tout the useless vaccine as the magical way to end it all. Magical thinking, not reality.

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And then there is this:

On October 4, AG Merrick Garland issued a memorandum announcing a concentrated effort to target any threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment by parents toward school personnel.

In a quiet response to the Senate Judiciary Committee three days before Christmas, the Biden DOJ says it won't withdraw a controversial memo used to activate the FBI Counterterrorism Division to investigate parents voicing their opposition to a variety of topics - primarily mask and vaccine mandates, and teaching critical race theory.

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This stuff didn’t help. Eric Adams, NYC’s new mayor, is just more of the same and probably worse… noncitizens may now vote in NYC elections - tomorrow it will be the state and the primaries and the generals.

https://apnews.com/article/voting-rights-new-york-new-york-city-voting-united-states-64edb2ed4de261156f5e717b61101247

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It appears that the #1 criterion for being a person in power in our government is a total lack of shame.

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In the military there was a saying you were promoted to your highest level of incompetence. These liberal SCOTUS justices skipped a few rungs on the ladder...

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"promoted to your highest level of incompetence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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That's always been the case everywhere for all time.

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