Monthly Archives: February 2021

Who Is The Real President? Serious Question.

Jim GeorgeFebruary 27, 2021

It may have become a trite and overused phrase, but we do live in very strange times, when a painfully stricken person not in command of whatever cognitive abilities he may have left with the title “President of the United States of America” while every person with a functioning mind knows he cannot possibly be making decisions as serious as that involving bombing another sovereign Nation. I have tried doing some perhaps-not-rigorous enough research to see if there have been any serious analyses making an attempt to at least make an educated guess as to who is pulling the big lever(s) behind the curtain, but have come up empty handed. Like many of us, I have winced at the clips of “The President” mumbling and stumbling through public remarks, like those he made yesterday in Houston, and the pain and embarrassment one feels has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with simple humanity, not to mention a feeling approaching rage at how family members can be so power hungry as to put one of their elders through this public humiliation. 

I have seen it suggested, and have suggested it myself, that Susan Rice is the major force either making, or behind, the major decisions. I also saw recently suggestions that Ron Klain, Chief of Staff, was in the thick of some of the decision making. 

I have been struck by the somewhat benign attitude about what I consider an extremely dangerous and perilous vacuum in what our Founding Fathers designed to be the “energetic Executive” with jokes and nicknames (the gentleman from Madame Tussauds) about a situation over which Xi and Putin are assuredly licking their murderous chops. 

Does anyone have anything to offer on who is actually occupying the most powerful office in the world?

Serious question.

Thanks to Brahms, Copland, Pensacola Symphony Orchestra and the Enlightened Leadership of Gov. Ron De Santis of Florida!

Jim George

February 26, 2021

This is an exuberant, enthusiastic note of thanks for the first experience of live classical music in over a year, thanks to the genius of Brahms, Copland, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Peter Rubardt, and, last but not least, the enlightened leadership of our new home state of Florida and its Governor, Ron DeSantis, for letting us live and laugh and enjoy life and dine out (or in!) and make a living and, this past weekend, enjoy the thrill and the magic of live classical music once again!

Yes, masks were required and there was limited, distanced seating, but there was magnificent music, starting with Copland’s Appalachian Spring followed by one of the most challenging pieces ever written for violin, the Brahms Violin Concerto, performed flawlessly (in the most humble opinion of this musically uneducated person) by the brilliant, two- time Grammy Nominee, Jennifer Frautschi. 

We moved to our new home state 2 1/2 years ago from our lifetime home of Baton Rouge, Louisiana for many of the same reasons more and more are doing so now, especially those who are trying to escape states run by petty tyrants like Cuomo, Whitmer, Wolf and Newsom. Little did we know, however, starting our new life here in the Florida Panhandle well before the pandemic went into overdrive a year ago, how many benefits would accrue to us as a result of our choice, and how much richer and more open our lives would be compared to what has to be the miserable locked-down, triple masked-up, no outside activities at all existence of so many of our fellow Americans. My Lady and I were at lunch a few days ago at a very nice and jam-packed restaurant and I looked around and saw happy, lively, spirited, laughing Floridians having a fine time, which would have been impossible in states led by those power-mad little martinets listed above. I remarked to My Lady that the Mask and Distance Compliance Police in many states would be aghast at such a happy and life-filled scene–quelle horreur! 

Gov. DeSantis and Florida are clearly leading the way or, as was so well put in an article in the Federalist a few days ago, 

Gov. Ron DeSantis has put the leaders of locked-down blue states to shame, and Democrat politicians are ashamed to admit it.

One of the best discussions of his common sense approach was authored by our colleague Susan Quinn, appropriately entitled Gov. Ron DeSantis Defies the Media and the Federal Governmentin which she relates facts about our governor most assuredly not reported by the mainstream media which has attacked him repeatedly and relentlessly as he is such a living, breathing refutation to their ongoing narrative about the pandemic and the multitudinous ways our rights have to be taken away to combat it. I highly recommend her piece and note my 100% concurrence in her conclusion:

With his courage and defiance, I hope DeSantis will consider running for the Presidency in 2024.

As a matter of fact, I have started touting a DeSantis-Noem ticket for 2024 in the event President Trump decides not to offer himself (and his family) up for another four years of demeaning abuse and degradation.

The Federalist article offers a brief summary of the main features which make DeSantis’ approach so different from the draconian approach of the Democrat governors:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis started lifting lockdown restrictions back in May, allowing stores and restaurants to begin reopening in all but three counties in South Florida. The stay-at-home order also ended at the beginning of May. Unlike New York and California, Florida never tried to bar people from going to religious services.

At the end of September, DeSantis lifted all remaining statewide COVID-19 restrictions. Traveling back and forth from COVID-conscientious Northern Virginia to Florida, I could notice a difference. In Florida, kids were going to school, wedding parties were throwing receptions, young people were studying at coffee shops, and families were taking Christmas pictures downtown on the square.

By my observation, people wanted to keep living their lives, and they came to Florida to do it. The numbers suggest the same thing. Florida ranks third in the nation for one-way U-Haul rentals in 2020. (The state was behind only Tennessee and Texas, where lockdowns have also been comparatively less extreme.)

Despite the media’s rapturous coverage of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who sent more than 9,000 potentially contagious patients into nursing homes and then covered it up — New York ranked 42nd on U-Haul one-ways. California, which was still shut down at the beginning of 2021, ranks dead last of all 50 states.

“When I go around Florida, I will see New York license plates here,” DeSantis told Tucker Carlson on Monday. “I doubt you see very many Florida license plates making their way to New York right now.”

Also noted is the fact that the Biden administration has, in just one more of its many authoritarian moves, threatened to ban travel to and from Florida, an idea so breathtakingly stupid and totally unconstitutional it is hard to believe that even this Marxist/Socialist cabal would attempt it:

As Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has pointed out, Biden called Trump’s proposed travel ban on China “xenophobic” and insisted a European travel ban would “not stop” coronavirus.

The only reason to shut down travel to Florida — where coronavirus numbers are often below average and no lockdowns have crippled the economy — is political theater. DeSantis has put the leaders of locked-down blue states to shame, and Democrat politicians are ashamed to admit it.

If they have been put to shame by governors like DeSantis and Kristi Noem of South Dakota they are about to have more reason to resent their solid approach as it appears the whole raison d’etre for their autocratic edicts may be crumbling soon. A recent analysis appearing on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health predicts, as stated in the title, “We’ll have herd immunity by April.”

This rare dose of good news has caused quite a stir and has drawn howls of derision and condemnation from “our betters” but it is supported by very convincing data–those pesky facts that get in the way of a good, dark, pessimistic narrative:

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

***

My prediction that Covid-19 will be mostly gone by April is based on laboratory data, mathematical data, published literature and conversations with experts. But it’s also based on direct observation of how hard testing has been to get, especially for the poor. If you live in a wealthy community where worried people are vigilant about getting tested, you might think that most infections are captured by testing. But if you have seen the many barriers to testing for low-income Americans, you might think that very few infections have been captured at testing centers. Keep in mind that most infections are asymptomatic, which still triggers natural immunity.

As these developments take shape they more and more firmly corroborate the wisdom of governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem — as an article I saw recently put it, from memory, “the pandemic is coming to an end, whether Dr. Fauci likes it or not.” No one can, in good conscience, even seem to downplay a pandemic which has taken 500,000 lives from us, and nothing said here is in any way meant to be so interpreted. However, if these apparently soundly based predictions prove correct in the next month or two, as Dr. Makary said: “… we also need to reopen schools and society to limit the damage of closures and prolonged isolation.” 

How inestimably glorious it would be to get back to living! Everywhere! It may be happening soon! 

Grotesqueries about Rush’s passing: When did we become animals?

The Daily Wire has a piece this morning entitled ‘I’m Glad Rush Limbaugh Lived Long Enough To Get Cancer And Die.’ Blue-Check Leftists Celebrate Rush Limbaugh’s Death”, a long, detailed, extremely sickening display of comments so vile, so devoid of humanity and compassion, they are truly enough to make one sick at the stomach. Following will be just a very few of the most outrageous of these after which I will pose a few questions about what these comments tell us about where we are as a Nation built on the premise that while we were all free to express our opinions, it was assumed we would do so in good faith and from a basis of good will and being fully informed. 

The author opens this horrid collection of abominations by noting “Following an unfortunately familiar pattern in the aftermath of the death of a conservative figure, Leftists rushed to mock Rush Limbaugh and celebrate news of his death after a year-long battle with lung cancer.”

The first example he cites is a person in the leadership of an organization curiously named Catholics for Choice (how is that even possible, even in our almost totally upside-down world?) who had these lovely remarks to offer:

Charlotte Clymer, whose Twitter bio states that she works for the pro-abortion Catholics for Choice, took to the social media platform and described Limbaugh as a “coward and white supremacist.”

“He aggressively and cynically exploited divisions in our country by weaponizing hatred and bigotry for his own personal gain. He was in service to his own greed, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and that is how history will remember him,” she wrote.

“If Rush Limbaugh deserves credit for anything, it his pioneering work in spreading disinformation and directly enabling our nation’s current state of vast distrust of experts and spurning of good faith in the public discourse. He will not be missed by rational adults.”

Some person named Cenk Uygur, who is apparently famous for something and hosts his own show which I never heard of, admittedly no high bar as there are more and more things in this increasingly strange and foreign world I have elected to avoid in the name of what little mental health I have left, has these reassuring words for the rest of his confreres in The Animal Farm:

Host of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, stated that “The idea that you say artificially nice things about people after they die is weird,” and that he “never understood the logic of it.”

“Rush Limbaugh was a terrible person while he was alive. He made a living by attacking the powerless. His death does not in anyway change or redeem that,” Uygur added.

An Editor of Media Matters, that source of reasoned, enlightened discourse and exchange of views which can always be counted on to try to destroy as many lives and reputations as possible, had this rare note of warmth in this collection of vipers’ venom, but not for Humanity:

Parker Malloy, an editor at large for Media Matters, wrote “I was 4 days into a weeklong break from Twitter, but Limbaugh dying felt like a necessary moment to reemerge.”

“My sincerest condolences go out to hell’s other residents who now have to deal with being associated with him,” she continued.

The hypocrisy of one of the comments almost, but not entirely, overcame the meanness of the comments from David Axelrod, former campaign manager and general right-hand flunky (can I still say that without expecting a visit from the Thought Police?) of the absolutely, clearly, without question most polarizing and divisive President in American History, Barack Hussein Obama:

Whether you loved him or hated him-and there are very few people in between-Rush Limbaugh was indisputably a force of historic proportions.
Over the past three decades, he did as much to polarize our politics as anyone and laid the groundwork for Trump and Trumpism.

In a dreadfully poisonous tweet, this denizen of the deep called Rush– you guessed it!– poisonous!

In this now deleted tweet, Jared Yates Sexton wrote that “Rush Limbaugh was one of the most harmful and poisonous people in the modern United States of America,” and that “His pursuit of wealth and power hurt untold numbers of people and wrought incalculable damage to politics as a public good, society as a whole, and the planet itself.”

“[P]olitics as a public good?” At the risk of publicly admitting that I have finally, as a result of the last few months, crossed over from disappointment and disgust with politics into pure, unadulterated cynicism, it is difficult to imagine thinking of “politics” in its current iteration as anything even approaching “a public good.” 

And then there is this model of civility by someone identified as an actor who wrote one of those messages on Twitter which only a member of the Marxist wing of the Democrat party could pass by the Twitter Brownshirts without being banned for life (obviously sanitized in view of the C of C):

Rush Limbaugh was a foul f_ _ _ rat who spread nothing but hate & terror throughout his career. His radio show poisoned hundreds of millions of people’s minds. He’s a racist, a misogynist, & homophobe. His death brings me joy.

It is apparent that Hell and its Master Satan are very prominent in the thinking –probably giving them way too much credit for actually doing any of that — of these vicious, angry, snarling people:

Feeling very sorry for the people of Hell who now have to deal with Rush Limbaugh for the rest of eternity

And:

Satan finding out Rush Limbaugh is on his way.

There is, sadly, much more, in this particular article and all over those supposedly closely monitored social media sites-you know, for good taste, civility, accuracy, hate speech (what a joke, in light of some of the hate just in this piece alone!) — and it does prompt questions many of us find ourselves asking over and over again in this time hatred of President Trump, hatred of Senators who dared object to the tally of votes from one of, if not the, most corrupt elections in our history, allegations by the looniest of the loons, AOC, of attempted murder hurled at a highly respected member of the Senate, Ted Cruz, hatred of every single person who voted for President Trump and now hatred of the very soul of a departed hero of America whose main crime was to not only speak his mind in favor of conservatism but to do it clearly, intelligently, persistently to a huge following for over 30 years. 

From my vantage point as a retired trial lawyer (or, as my law partner and wife refer to that status, a Lawyer in Recovery) living a life of relative tranquility in the Florida Panhandle, I am able to honestly state that we simply do not know any people so filled with hate that they would be capable of statements like some of those we are seeing about Rush. I did, most definitely, know a few “haters” in active practice, both in and out of Black Robes, and they did, in fact, poison every thing, person, institution, around them with their bile and meanness. 

Do you know anyone who is capable of this kind of hatred? I hope not. But, if you do, I would be most interested in hearing about them and, if you know, how they came to hate so deeply, so bitterly, so devoid of human goodness or kindness. 

It is worth thinking about and discussing, as these are real, live persons (?) and, whether we like to admit it or not, their side of the aisle controls all three branches of our government today. 

As I was completing this discussion, I happened to see Victor Davis Hanson’s article this morning, entitled, aptly for purposes of this subject matter, “Our descent into collective madness.” Its opening line is: “These are crazy times.”

Indeed. 

Hillsdale Online Courses: A Beacon of Light for These Days of Darkness

“The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. …Learning is the only thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn.” Merlin in The Once and Future King.

I woke up this morning with the realization that my life begins most mornings with looking at a screen filled with images which could have been taken from the pages of Dante’s Inferno–Madness. Disorder. Cruelty. Chaos. Meanness of Spirit. Incivility. No Manners. Bad Manners. An Almost Total Lack of Courtesy Toward Each Other. And emails which are often just print versions of the same with ads from companies/people I frequently have not a clue as to who they are or why they want my money. As I awakened I kept thinking of the one word to describe what was missing from my life: pleasure. I thought of music, culture, literature, learning, history, beauty (in memory of Sir Roger Scruton, RIP, the great philosopher and advocate for more beauty in everyday life), museums, art galleries, antique shops (remembering strolls along Magazine Street, New Orleans), so many lovely and valuable things almost totally missing from this world of venality we live in today. I want more of those things in my life and fewer of the venal, cruel, ugly things. And I shall have them. I say with genuine hope and aspiration on this crisp, bright, sparkling clear morning which The Lord has given us and will endeavor with all my might and will to rejoice and be glad in it! The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Our Lord could never have wanted us to live in a world so nearly devoid of pleasure and courtesy and niceness and consideration for one’s fellow man as we see all around us today.

All of which, as our Nation stands poised to watch the beginning of what seems like the 10th or 15th Impeachment of President Trump, as dreary, venal, vitriolic, mean spirited an exercise as may be imagined, brings me to my prescribed therapy for the darkness with which we are shrouded and apparently will be for another couple of years. Thus, I turn to my prescription for some of the best therapy I have discovered, in the hope you may find it to be of benefit, as well. It is the therapy of learning new things, as prescribed by no less a personage than Merlin himself.

While is know there are any number of online courses available, not to mention videos of talks on many sites such as You Tube (and I would be most interested in hearing of some of your favorites so I can check them out), I cannot recommend too highly the many well produced offerings of Hillsdale College, taught by outstanding faculty of the college and covering any number of fascinating areas of study. They are free of charge, although the consumer is offered the opportunity to donate to the College, which accepts not one single dime of Federal funds, freeing it up to teach such subjects as the classics, American history, inclusion of portions of the Bible in its course on Great Books 101, Ancient to Medieval, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc. I note, in explaining why I am so “hooked” on the courses– in addition to my love for Hillsdale College and all it stands for– I have now completed courses on Shakespeare, American History (based on the recent textbook, “The Great American Story, A Land of Hope”, and taught by its author, Dr. Wilfred McClay), Great Books 101, Ancient to Medieval (including The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aneid, The Book of Job, Dante’s Inferno) taught by members of the English Department at the College. I have just started Western Heritage: From Genesis to John Locke and next up for me will be The Second World Wars, taught by the eminent military historian, Victor Davis Hanson.

They are accessible at online.hillsdale.edu and here is just a brief sampling of the wonderful smorgasbord of learning on offer: Introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics: How to Live a Good Life (material we could all benefit from in these days of “the dark winter”), Introduction to the Constitution, American Heritage From Colonial Settlement to the Current Day, Athens and Sparta, Winston Churchill and Statesmanship, An Introduction to C.S. Lewis: Writings and Significance and a number of others.

As I reviewed the Hillsdale site to set forth the short illustrative list above, I realized how many adventures in learning I have ahead of me and it is my genuine hope that I may have piqued your interest in these great courses as well. As I am well into Dante’s Inferno as a result of the superb lecture on that work I just attended taught by Professor Stephen Smith , I will close by noting that while I am fairly certain getting involved in these courses will almost certainly lift you out of the horrible morass of The Inferno and may even get you up on Mount Purgatorio, whether you complete your journey all the way up to Paradiso is entirely up to you!

Happy Learning!