Trafalgar, 1805, and the USA, 2022

Trafalgar Day was marked last week, and I remembered again the essay written in 1797 by a Spanish naval official, Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, on the question:  “Why do we keep losing to the British, and what can we do about it?”

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

Accordingly, both he and his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeures…

Thus they can never make up their minds to seize any favourable opportunity that may present itself. They are fettered by the strict rule to keep station which is enforced upon then in both navies, and the usual result is that in one place ten of their ships may be firing on four, while in another four of their comrades may be receiving the fire of ten of the enemy. Worst of all they are denied the confidence inspired by mutual support, which is as surely maintained by the English as it is neglected by us, who will not learn from them.

Imagine Don Grandallana’s feelings when, eight years later, he read the reports of the Spanish naval catastrophe at Trafalgar.  He had accurately diagnosed the key problems of his side, but had been unable to bring about the sweeping changes necessary to address them.

There are uncomfortable parallel in America today to the polities and mindset that Grandallana observed in his headed-for-defeat Spain.

Over at Ricochet, the physician who posts as Dr Craniotomy describes the extent to which his time is devoted to satisfying the bureaucracy and its systems.

It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday and I’m waiting for my hospital’s slow, clunky electronic health record (EHR) to load. I’m logging in from home because the administration emails became threatening.,,,The patients were already seen by me, and the notes written by either a resident or nurse practitioner.  The hospital just can’t bill until I click the “cosign” button. 

Meanwhile, there’s this JAMA article outlining how the National Academy of Medicine is going to tackle physician burnout.  The plan revolves around installing a “culture of well-being” into the healthcare workplace.  They want to develop training protocols to address discrimination, bullying, and harassment while increasing leadership roles such as Chief Wellness Officers.  This sounds like more bureaucratic busywork to complete and administrators to answer to.  I would be shocked to find out that there was a single aliquot of improved wellness from a wellness module.

I have governmentally mandated appropriate use criteria that questions every imaging order I place on a patient, forcing me to click box after box, justifying an MRI that I know is clinically indicated because I spent 12 years training in neurological surgery to know exactly when an MRI is indicated.

I have the joint commission telling me I’m not prescribing enough pain medication one day and the next day, I’m being threatened with manslaughter charges if I don’t check a slow, cumbersome, often nonfunctional online database every time I write a prescription.

As I noted in comments to the post:  The “culture of compliance” and the micromanagement of employees by bureaucracies and by rigid automated systems, as practiced in America today, bear a disturbing resemblance to the cultural practices that Don de Grandallana identified as the main cause of his country’s repeated defeats.

There is a great deal of this kind of thing in many parts of America today, and trends have been running that way for a long time.  See this Washington Post article from 2005, back when the WP was not yet totally politicized:  Over-Ruled.  Discussing hurricane response and some of the bureaucratic obstacles that appeared, the author says:  “We’ve become a society of rule-followers and permission-seekers.”

Causes of this situation are multiple; certainly one factor is the prevalence of litigation.  Another is the proliferation of top-down automated systems.  And one factor, I think is the excessive emphasis on formal education and the associated credentials.   In his post The Most Precious Resource is Agency, Simon Sarris observes that when looking at people who became highly successful in earlier times, “the individuals were all doing from a young age, as opposed to merely schooling.”

He goes on to say:

It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to later do on their own. It is important to note that while we shouldn’t allow children to be bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job’s summer job at 13 as his exploitation. We should be thinking much harder about making sure children can make meaningful contributions to the world.

also

And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Does an assumption that people will spend 16 or 20 consecutive years in formal education…and the related assumption that this formal education will be the most important factor in their future success or lack of same…reduce the sense of individual agency? I think it probably does.

Also, this brings us to another factor that Grandallana did not mention, either because he didn’t see it as a problem or because he didn’t dare talk about it: the dominance of a hereditary aristocracy.  I think it’s pretty clear to historians now that one major reason for Spain’s naval failures was that people tended to be placed in command positions because of their titles and bloodlines, rather than their demonstrated competence.

We don’t have a formal aristocracy in the US, of course; indeed, the Constitution explicitly prohibits any such thing.  But while educational credentialism was initially sold as a form of meritocracy, and indeed did initially lead to some progress in that direction, it has devolved in too many cases to a form of aristocracy light, where obtaining the most ‘elite’ credential is largely a matter of conducting your early life in a manner of which admissions officers approve–including demonstrating the ‘right’ social attitudes–and, often, of having the right family and connections, rather than a matter of true performance-related merit.

More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote that a major advantage America had over Europe is that access to key roles in society was not controlled by a admission to a small number of ‘elite’ universities.

The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…

American society today is much closer to accepting that and similar claims than it was when Drucker wrote the above in 1969, and I think this has something to do with the dysfunctionality of many of our institutions.

For discussion: How far are we down the road to the kind of environment that Grandallana described? What are the causes, and what are the potential paths for reversal?

57 thoughts on “Trafalgar, 1805, and the USA, 2022”

  1. An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight…

    I read this, and I recalled reading about the endless rules-of-engagement that American troops were forced to endure in the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. For example, the members of a seal team that were killed because they were denied permission to shoot at the person shooting at them. Supposedly, a rocket or RPG was fired at their helicopter, missed, they wanted to shoot back, were denied- and the next shot killed them.

    So I’d say we’re pretty far down the road that Grandallana lamented his country was traveling upon. Our wanna-be aristocrats mis-ruling America no more trust our own soldiers to kill our enemies than the Spanish monarchy trusted its naval officers to fight the British.

    What are the causes, and what are the potential paths for reversal?

    This is the collapse as envisioned in The Fourth Turning, and the solution is to replace our idiot credential-worshipping self-described “elite” with people who are competent enough to think their way out of entrapment by a paper bag.

    Time will tell if we can manage it. The Spanish did not, alas.

  2. Your medical system is run by your insurance companies. After going through fairly major surgery, I am most grateful I live in BC Canada, where it is run by the government.

  3. ninety some years later, they lost the rest of their empire in manila bay, and off the coast of santiago, some speculate the anarchists targeted their most able policy makers,

  4. the spanish army was one largely of occupation, weyler* who along with kitchener, brought concentration camp into the lexicon, the last in south africa, what you would call a filtration center nowadays

    *a junior officer of his, Angel Castro, settled in Cuba, and you know him by his illegitimate son’s deeds

  5. at the time of the statement, spain had been an empire for about 300 years not only in the Americas but the Phillipines, even the former redoubt from whence the moors had invaded 800 years earlier, morocco, the reconquista, began in earnest about 300 years later, with the battle of badajoz

    we were fresh to the power wielding game, just jousting with Revolutionary France, later the Barbary Pirates, and a rematch with the Brits,

    now we have a caste system that has power and prestige, but little practical knowledge, in fact is eschews facts that don’t fit narratives,

  6. The medical student that has no dream beyond filling out endless forms and clicking millions of boxes, sometimes with the added adventure of a misbehaving mouse; who wouldn’t want him or her or them or… for your physician? Know that while you’re bleeding out or breathing your last, your death certificate will be meticulously documented and the hospital will be able to bill your estate for every penny they have coming to them.

  7. Grandallana’s description of the British system is analogous to what the Germans (and subsequently others) referred to as “mission orders,” i.e., outlining the basic objectives to be achieved while giving substantial discretion to each unit commander over how to achieve those objectives.

    I am also reminded of an Iraqi army document describing Iraqi communications systems during Desert Storm. Essentially a hub and spoke system where all information went through central command.

    The British system/mission orders recognizes that in combat information is highly localized and much information is lost (and time is lost) passing that information up and down the chain of command. Effective operation of this system requires capable subordinates able to combine their local knowledge with the overall plan expressed in the mission orders, and the confidence to do so.

    Discretion becomes more problematic when “agency problems” are acute, i.e., the individual interests of any agent are contrary to those of the organization. These problems are likely to be more acute in economic/bureaucratic settings than in combat (although they are not unknown there, with glory hunting being an example of an agency problem). So mission orders or the like in bureaucratic/economic settings is not necessarily efficient.

  8. I strongly recommend “The Art of Action” by Stephen Bungay for a detailed description of the system the Germans used to allow their army to respond effectively.

    It depends on allowing flexibility by not over particularizing orders.

    I have a feeling that some number of the problems we see in our society and especially in our government’s laws and programs are because the plans are so detailed at the highest levels by the time they reach implementation they are all but unworkable.

  9. The German doctrine of initiative and exploitation of opportunity worked well when things were going well, less so when the tide started to turn and Hitler issued his not one inch decrees. Millions of troops sacrificed for nothing when the were needed most. Stalin ran a near race in futile sacrifice without ever embracing autonomy.

    The Brits also shot an admiral for “failing to do his utmost”. Initiative going forward, consequences for retreat. With your shield or on it never dies.

  10. The French writer and aviator Antoine de St-Exupery:

    “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic. I shall not forget the lesson taught me by my enemy himself. What direction should the armored column take to invest the rear of the enemy? Nobody can say. What should the armored column be for this purpose? It should be weight of sea pressing against dike.

    What ought we do? This. That. The contrary of this or that. There is no determinism that governs the future. What ought we be? That is the essential question, the question that concerns spirit and not intelligence. For spirit impregnates intelligence with the creation that is to come forth. And later, intelligence is brought to the bed of creation. How should man go about building the first ship ever known? Very complicated, this. The ship will be born of a thousand errors and fumblings. But what should man be to build the first ship? Here I seize the problem of creation at the root. Merchant. Soldier. In love with the prospect of faraway lands. For then of necessity designers and builders will be born of that love. They will drain the energy of workmen and one day launch a ship. What should we do the annihilate a forest? The question is not easy. What be? Obviously, a forest fire.”

  11. Over at Ricochet, the physician who posts as Dr Craniotomy describes the extent to which his time is devoted to satisfying the bureaucracy and its systems.

    Theodore Dalrymple has written many times about the bureaucracy of the British NHS (and other organs of the government): Capital expenditures on useless “look good” projects, burdensome rules, box-ticking, report-writing, callous indifference to the suffering of real people when their needs fall outside box-ticking procedures of the bureaucracy….

  12. American Medicine was destroyed by Obamacare. A few years ago, when I was still teaching, we faculty members had a “bitch session” to discuss problems. I had retired from practice by that time, so it was interesting to hear from others. I was told that 25% of their time was now devoted to the Electronic Health Record (no longer “medical record.”) A few of the faculty members there had dropped all insurance, including Medicare, and had cash practices. This reduced overhead by 75% and they were much happier than young docs who still had student loans and children to educate. A neurosurgeon does not sound like a candidate for cash practice but I know orthopedic surgeons who are doing it. The busiest hip replacement surgeon in Newport Beach a few years ago was cash only. He charged what Medicare paid.

    Medicine has gone from the “Cottage Industry” condemned by Senator Kennedy to Industrial Medicine which leaves a large share of the employee physicians unhappy. Now, the plan to correct this is to lower standards and go to race conscious admissions policy.

    As far as the US military is concerned, we are in trouble. The British forgot all that stuff about initiative between 1812 and 1914. The Royal Navy was a hidebound bureaucracy by 1914. German technology was far superior and the early battles showed the decline in RN tactics and doctrine. The battle of Coronel was a first warning.

    The US military is being hollowed out by “Woke” and racist policies imposed by the far left who are now in control. There was an early warning a few years ago with this letter which was published.

    However, during my time on the West Point faculty (2006-2009 and again from 2013-2017), I personally witnessed a series of fundamental changes at West Point that have eroded it to the point where I question whether the institution should even remain open.

  13. When Ted (the floater) made the health care industry all about the money, and the need for the government to step in and fix it, the US healthcare system got started in a death spiral.
    Obamacare just increased the speed of altitude loss.
    I retired from one of the big healthcare companies and to hear someone say that it’s run by the companies, and not by the heavy hand of government, is a bit surreal.

  14. I retired from one of the big healthcare companies and to hear someone say that it’s run by the companies, and not by the heavy hand of government, is a bit surreal.

    I think I have previously posted an analysis of this but don’t find it at the moment. Health Insurance was never popular with insurance companies. They had valid reasons. It was a loser. Part of the problem was that incentives were wrong. Way back when I began practice, most health insurance was “Indemnity” type, which paid a fixed amount for a diagnosis or procedure. The theory, one reason I have always supported the French system, was that insurance was based on premiums and probabilities. If you got appendicitis and had your appendix out, your insurance paid a fixed amount based on your policy. Actuaries could calculate premiums and losses.

    About 1973, the concept of “Usual, Customary, and Reasonable” became more common. Doctors were largely at fault for this. Medical inflation followed and, with that, came the government. First, Nixon tried to deal with it by sponsoring HMOs. These would put doctors on salary and provide care for the premium paid. The problem was that incentives were reversed. The HMO made more money by restricting care and they became unpopular. Originally, those like Kaiser and Ross-Loos were nonprofit but eventually for profit HMOs were started, mostly by entrepreneurs. The care rationing was worse and doctors were manipulated to enforce rationing. For example, one HMO I know of provided annual bonuses based on utilization, or lack of it. The annual bonuses were 1/2 the annual income for member MDs.

    I don’t want to write a book here so I will limit this. The more UCR fees increased inflation, the more onerous the government regulation became. The end stage was Obamacare. THe attraction for insurance companies was the idea of being “Administrative Service Organizations” much as they are for employer plans. The insurance company processes claims for a fee and the employer pays the bills. One problem here is that every medical service requires a claim to get paid. That costs a lot and limits the cost saving. With Obamacare, the government is paying the claims. That works better in theory than in practice.

    I’ll stop there.

  15. Health insurance in the US appears to have gotten its start due to government interference in the work place salary world. Once it appeared, the government then started to interfere in it as well.
    I’m from the government, and I’m here to help….

  16. In an entirely unrelated area, I see the same thing. I teach basic shooting classes. More and more often, people ask me what is the ‘best’ pistol, rifle, shotgun, ammunition, or accessory for them. They want to be told, they don’t want to learn. They want ‘permission’, in order to not have to choose. The software and the machines make it so easy to search for ‘The Best ____’ without considering anything else. This mindset carries over to management and academia, in that only ‘the best’ counts, all else is not acceptable. And too often, ‘the best’ is what someone who knows nothing about the subject has chosen.

  17. “How far are we down the road to the kind of environment that Grandallana described? What are the causes, and what are the potential paths for reversal?”

    Here in California we are immersed in bureaucracy. Our residential construction business has been hobbled horribly. It was frog in the pot, but we are headed to boiling. Today I spoke with a permit expeditor and she told me it took her 2 years to obtain a permit for a small remodel in Santa Monica. I’m sure someone paid plenty for her services, which do not include the plans or the city fees.As for the fix, it will only happen when people stop believing that the government is their savior and knows best and rediscovers the concept of private property. This essay comports with the subject–overregulation. That is the word that should become the banner of change.

    Our Enemies Walk Among Us – by Elizabeth Nickson
    https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/our-enemies-walk-among-us

  18. Three thoughts on the comments above…

    First, one of the most impressive displays of tactical initiative in WW II was the response of II SS Panzer when the British 1st Airborne dropped into its rear areas. Corneilus Ryan had a good narrative of it in A Bridge Too Far but basically the Germans formed impromptu battlegroups consisting largely of rear echelon troops and fatally slowed the British drive on Arnhem. Yes it was impressive for both the rapid German response to a surprise assault and use of non-front line troops, but also remarkable for the fact that II SS Panzer Corps was so badly depleted after its mauling in France.

    Second, as far as bureaucracy in medical care. I just finished re-reading Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics in order to evaluate for suitability for home schoolers (answer, Yes!) One of the reasons the book is so, and makes it suitable for students, is constant reference to the unintended results of economic interactions that makes it impossible to adequately plan for. He even quotes Engels’ “What each individual will is is obstructed by everyone else and what emerges is something that no one wills.”

    I wonder if we could develop a similar line of reasoning regarding government programs, whether regulatory or programmatic. Any program starts with the best of intentions, the best paving material for the road to Hell, and ends up as a unwieldy mess. If you are a public administration anthropologist, I guarantee that when you go to uncover the origin for such a tangled mess, of say environmental policy or Medicare, you will find a lot of smart people doing their best to create a well-reasoned, proportionate program that invariably falls short because we as humans are unable to develop an adequate response to the interaction of all actors and variables. Such well-intentioned ineptitude would kind of sweet in its innocence except it has become so predictable (I will call it “The Iron Law of Programmatic Unpredictability’) and therefore inexcusable to not be taken into account each and every time more regulation is invoked

    Third, so PenGun above brought up the virtue of government-run health care vs. the complexity of private insurance. I have several family members that have come out in favor of single-payer based on the maddening complexity of navigating through the insurance system. However leaving aside the unique advantages Canada has of using the US as a safety valve for the waiting lists inherent in the system or the fact that we basically subsidize Canada’s prescription drugs. No the question is why would you hand more power to the government? Because you feel that government is some uniquely munificent actor? After all that we saw with COVID? One unique contribution Canada has made regarding the debate about government policy is the creation of an indelible standard by which to judge the wisdom of said policy. That standard is how would you feel about a given program if you knew that Justin Trudeau, the poster boy for soft totalitarianism, was going to run it?

    Hey, it’s not all bad right? I could pay that nominal co-pay for my single-payer health care using my government issued digital currency

  19. The end result of such bureaucracy is the new ruling that California doctors can lose their licenses for providing “misinformation” on Covid. Since I still have a CA license, I will stop there.

  20. “One unique contribution Canada has made regarding the debate about government policy is the creation of an indelible standard by which to judge the wisdom of said policy. That standard is how would you feel about a given program if you knew that Justin Trudeau, the poster boy for soft totalitarianism, was going to run it?”

    I don’t disagree that our Justin is a huge disappointment, but memes precisely like this one, have reduced any conversations we might have had to meme zingers.

    Its not a step in a useful direction.

  21. I don’t disagree that our Justin is a huge disappointment, but memes precisely like this one, have reduced any conversations we might have had to meme zingers.

    Pengun, I agree with you on this point. Name-calling and facile labeling are as unproductive to understanding when conservatives do it as when leftists do it. The click-driven incentive structures of social media and online news businesses have high social costs.

  22. I did not mean to be shallow in my mention of Justin Trudeau, I can see how one might be irked by a simple “drive-by” comment and I apologize for making offense and/or not going into detail about what I meant by my reference to him. I will now go into some detail (as I am now in a boring Zoom ) and go further by calling him not only a tyrant but a terrible warning for America.

    First of all some personal background. I had lived a number of years in Canada, like the place, and while there imbibed its implicit anti-Americanism. When I try to explain that attitude, I go back in history and point out that back in 1776 there were 14 North American colonies, that 13 joined the Revolution, and that Canada being the 14th did not. That historical fact combined the wariness of sharing both a long border and many cultural aspects with a very large and vibrant neighbor can fill up a lot of books.

    I would like to think that wariness in part drives the old Commonwealth “peace, order, and good government” vs “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When I try to explain the difference between the two from the American perspective, I point to two examples. The first is from 1775 as the British were retreating from Concord to Boston (well described in Rick Atkinson’s “The British Are Coming”) in which nearby farmers rushed home to get their guns in order to snipe at the redcoat columns. Note these weren’t relatively, well-ordered Minuteman militias as was in Lexington but rather spontaneous acts by local citizens to wage war against what was until that morning was ostensibly their own army. The other example is when I picked up a Canadian friend of mine at the Phoenix airport and as we drove away he saw that quintessential Arizona sight of a motorcyclist riding his bike without a helmet and open carrying a handgun. He turned to me and asked “Why?” and I responded “No, the proper question should be ‘why not?’” We Americans, especially in Arizona, are fitted to be an unruly people and we should make no apologies for it.

    So what about The Indictment Against Justin Trudeau?

    We could pick several examples, especially from his COVID lockdown edicts, but I will instead focus on what should be the defining one, his treatment of the 2022 trucker protest “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa. In short a convoy of several hundred tractor trailers drove across Canada and into Ottawa in order to protest the Trudeau government’s COVID policies, and present their grievances to the government so that they might be addressed As the government was no responsive they parked their trucks in the streets around Parliament Hill and waited.

    Now there is a way present grievances through proper representative channels, but even in Canada the right to present those grievances through protest is acknowledged. Furthermore the proper representative channel route didn’t seem to get the truckers very far. To do these protests with all the deplorables and their honking trucks in the quiet civil service town of Ottawa is certainly different. What Trudeau did do?

    1) He refused to meet with the protesters, in fact he skipped town, and no one from his government met with them either. Ok, not good, but then…
    2) He then labeled the protesters essentially as anti-Canadian claiming they used “…Nazi symbolism, racist imagery” as well as “…desecration of war memorials…”
    3) He then invoked the never before used Emergencies Act, the successor to the War Measures Act, to crush and disperse the truckers through both use of police and cutting off their access to the financial system

    So in short Trudeau refused to acknowledge those protesting his government, when he did acknowledge he “otherized” them by labeling as anti-Canadian, and after publicly putting them beyond pale invoked emergency powers to crush them. Note I used the term “emergency powers” which is being generous to Trudeau because while the Emergency Act is the successor to the War Powers Act he did not invoke martial law though he could have. A technical point to be sure, but as an old professor of mine once said the use of such acts, like nuclear weapons, should be considered taboo and not to be under all but the most extreme circumstances.

    It’s not unheard of in any system for the powers that be to ignore protesters and their demands and I’m sure we can dredge up plenty of examples of that elsewhere in the world but when combined with Trudeau’s depiction of the protesters as beyond the pale with their alleged symbols and imagery and desecration of national symbols it starts to look like part of an overall strategy to not not only ignore but to isolate the protesters is being beyond the pale, illegitimate. Nice move if you can get away with it and the media and Trudeau’s political partners in the NDP did (the part has come a long way from Ed Broadbent let along Tommy Douglas, a taste of power will do that)

    As far as the media, I have noticed a nefarious strategy among legacy media platforms especially in the US. These outlets will readily report the existence of allegations , but not spending a lot of time investigating whether those allegations are true which means while the given outlet is not overt lying, it is being deceitful. You see this phenomena in the media coverage of the trucker protests; allegations of misconduct but not investigation of whether Trudeau’s allegations are actually true (too good to check!) Now that biased reporting of the truckers by the US media doesn’t seem so strange because their foreign reporting is usually pretty lazy. However when I followed the protests through legacy Canadian media (CBC, Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail) I noticed the same thing, reporting but not investigating the allegations. A story that everyone agrees is major national news, going on in the heart of the nation’s capital where they all have news bureaus, and a few hours drive from the major media outlets and you get this? They couldn’t get anyone to actually spend time in the crowds to report from the protests and verify what Trudeau was saying?

    It took some time but I found a few blogs from people who actually got into the protests and interviewed people and they didn’t find any of that far-right agitprop. The best account is a podcast on Spiked from the independent journalist Rupa Subramanya, hardly a right-winger, who as living in Ottawa visited the protesters on her own accord and found them to be anything but neo-Nazi Trumpers, in fact found them to be a very lovable lot, the very people you would not use the full power of the state against. She contrasted her findings with the popular image presented by Trudeau and in the press.

    Breaking the taboo and invoking the Emergency Act? Why? There were blockades of US-Canada border points but those were broken up by regular police before the Act was invoked. The Ottawa protests were dispersed up by regular police pulled from elsewhere in the province, so why were extraordinary measures taken? To get enough tow trucks?

    In the Canadian federal system, the prime minister wields very strong institutional power, backed further by strong party discipline in Parliament, and only weakly checked by the courts. Trudeau took that power and misused it to first cast out those citizens who disagreed with him and then when in combination of abusing the law crushed their protests.

    So back to that comment “… how would you feel about a given program if you knew that Justin Trudeau… was going to run it?” Sure one could see the theoretical need for the existence Emergency Act in order to deal with extraordinary events, but its proper use needs to be constrained not only by its specific language but also by the prudence provided by the political and cultural tradition in which it operates. One does not wield such power, whether the people who are its target are sympathetic or not, without exhausting all other possibilities.

    The bigger problem is not so much Trudeau but the decay of those political and cultural traditions which allowed him to get away with it “Peace, Order, and Good Government” only works if there is a tradition that constrains the use of “good government” otherwise you begin on the road to tyranny (all in the name of the common good). So given that Trudeau abused his powers in this with the truckers, why would you doubt he would act likewise if other, similar powers were available to him? Would you trust him with say a digital currency or a thermostat that could be controlled by a remote 3rd party? WWJD? I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s not just Canada but also other members of the Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand) where abusive actions are cloaked in terms of the greater good, it’s just Justin Trudeau is the first example that comes to mind.

    Trudeau is both a tyrant and a warning. In America we have a political class that is both divorcing itself from the political and cultural traditions of the nation while claiming extraordinary powers to address what it claims are pressing social and environmental issues. Trudeau and his actions show the dangers of that approach, of granting great powers that may be wielded by someone who does not feel themselves subject to proper limitations.

    The more these people talk the more I see the virtues of an unruly civil society.

  23. Three additional points:

    I see the link to the Spiked podcast I referenced didn’t take…. here it is: https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/why-the-truckers-revolt-matters/

    Second, I did not see Jonathan’s last comment until after I posted mine and it seems I have a struck nerve. On one hand I am surprised that anyone can consider a comment regarding Justin Trudeau clickbait and I did refrain from any of the more shrill comments about him regarding his appearance/mannerisms, parentage, or connections to certain Cuban dictators. Be as it may, I have considered both this blog and its comments to be of very high quality and have tried to match that quality with my (excruciating long) comments so I will take the admonishment to do better to heart and work to upgrade the quality of my work

    Third, is to Jonathan’s point regarding memes. I agree that what memes have become is both shrill and obnoxious. I have read Steve Heyward’s This Week in Pictures at Powerline for several years and while I enjoy some snapshots of Payson, AZ, I have found it has become tiresome. However lets look at what memes started with rather than what they have become, Memes are a way of transferring cultural information in a symbolic, humorous manner that has an immediate emotional/cultural resonance. A with any symbolic method of communication, the information in the meme represents a larger body of knowledge that can be easily retrieved by the reader; in a metaphorical sense the the meme is the visible structure resting on a deeper foundation. The humorous symbolism embodied in the meme, like a good joke or marketing, is a way of keeping the perceived truth represented by that knowledge in the forefront of cultural conversation in an easy vernacular. Much as we

    So with this definition of meme, let’s turn back to “What Would Justin Trudeau Do?” Upon the invocation of the Emergencies Act there was a lot of consternation in the Canadian media and political system for a time being; however, 8 months later it has largely fallen off the radar. Compare that to the foibles of the Biden Administration over the 19 months let alone Trump and Jan. 6. Perhaps when the Rouleau Inquiry reports next year it will then be a subject for serious discussion, but I doubt it more likely it will subsumed within the larger political establishment and Trudeau (given that I doubt he will stand for election again and nobody wants his minority government to fall) will skate. The opportunity to capture it and emotionally place it into part of the national consciousness through a memetic strategy and that makes Trudeau’s victory in the information war concerning the truckers complete. An effective meme strategy involving say WWJD (blasphemous I know) would grow out of a larger information strategy in the same way Let’s Go Brandon. Would it bring Trudeau to his knees, hardly though its mockery could cut him down to size a bit. The real value of a memetic strategy is not in defeating the adversary, which is very unlikely, but rather to convert the energy of a singular event into a larger “truth” that in turn can be used to organize part of an effective movement. A memetic strategy concerning the truckers would try to capture that energy, those concerns rather than allowing it to dissipate into the existing political process

    There has been a lot of talk about why Democrats cannot effectively meme and I think it’s not that they can’t but rather they prefer to organize based on fear (just read the Washington Post) and feel with their institutional dominance that they don’t need to. I can appreciate that but I think they can walk and chew gum at the same time and in addition to the fear of Trump, they could get even more mileage by meming him at the same time.

    Memes, even when done correctly in line with its original meaning, is a very unruly way of conducting politics and certainly wouldn’t have ever been discussed in my graduate seminars let alone a garden party in Bethesda. However that doesn’t mean we should, when done properly, discount it as an effective and honorable means to conduct our political messaging

    Like I said at the beginning, I’m sorry and I will do better.

  24. The entire fiasco in Ottawa could have been avoided by simply busting everyone for parking offences.

    I do not like the populist anti vax crap. Its just stupid, and I assume anyone flying the various flags in this dispute are well below average IQ. Look I’m flying a stupid flag, and I’m dumb.

    America is among the countries most involved in this madness, and not surprisingly has among the worst outcomes over Covid in the world. Well into the bottom 20 in killing so many people, and proud of it. I never did respect stupid.

    Simply busting all the halfwits, and making them pay for both fines, and to get their equipment back would have been a perfect response. Busting then for obstruction if they do not cooperate, and taking their equipment and selling it, would have been next on my list. We had all the laws we needed and instead threw up our hands, and panicked.

  25. I will note that PenGun expresses not a peep about hearing out what the protestors have to say. Like Justin, albeit perhaps fewer nails in those hobnailed boots, good little Stalinist that he is.

    Penny, I think you would have made a better impression had you ended with your last comment.

    What happened with your desire to travel to Russia to aid the cause? Got your visa yet? If you set up a Go Fund Me for that purpose, I will make a generous contribution. Promise!

    A note to others: In my opinion, PenGun never, ever enters into good faith discussion. He is always lurking in the shadows, ready to vent his spleen on those who are unlike him.

    I will add that I contributed $100 plus 10% to the Truckers second funding group (successor to Go Fund Me), whose name I have forgotten. It was returned due to the Gov’t clamp down. Maybe next time, Canadians will ask for guns and ammo? But I doubt it. To many Pennys.

  26. Is it true that Russia only has one broad non-commissioned officer rank?
    David, what about Uvalde – do you think it has any relevance to the point you are making? Does cashless bail? In general, our professions have been losing sight of their goals – of healing for doctors, of teaching a core curriculum for teachers, of arresting criminals and supplying information to the court system for justice for police, then for lawyers. Somewhere in the last decades of the last century bureaucratic forms and appearances (credentials a form of appearances) and we lost purpose, meaning.
    For me that was symbolized by the attitude in teacher’s colleges that emphasized the appearance of teaching rather than mastery of the subject but the same essence was everywhere. A post-modernist was impressed by his daughter, who took the elevator up and down in her mother’s office building and found the same thing repeated on each: cubicles of people bent over computers, copying and faxing. This depressed me for days since it was clear he thought – and was teaching his child – that what “was” was the form, the appearance, while the essence was what that office was trying to facilitate, to do, to make work. (Or not, I suppose.) But then, again, maybe they were all alike in that the forms represented forms and for the busy salesmen, clerks, bureaucrats the forms were the meaning.
    David, if businesses are now expected to weight diversity of staff (and clientele) more heavily than the usefulness and value of the service or product itself. One would think a businessman who loses sight of the usefulness of his companies service or goods and who promotes staff staff other than meritorious grounds would fail as much as a soldier or doctor, if with less obvious bloodshed.

  27. Name-calling and facile labeling are as unproductive to understanding when conservatives do it as when leftists do it.

    Perhaps. But as I used to say somewhere else, the game we’re playing is politics. The political left never stops shrieking about how loathsome and evil conservatives are, quite often backed up with violence. The response from the political right is to complain about civility, followed up by efforts to chase away the grubby vulgarians who want to respond in kind. Eventually the GOP establishment succeeded with all that, which gave them the presidency of Donald Trump, which also failed to please them, somehow.

    Anyway, I came back to this thread to note that I found it ironic that a doctor commenting at Ricochet would be lamenting the endless idiocy imposed by the regime’s bureaucracy when I recall how hard that site worked to drive away Trump supporters a few years ago. I certainly don’t think the doctor is wrong, but fixing the problem requires a political party with sufficient control of the government to enact changes- and if you can’t tolerate in your swanky political party or at your swanky website folks being a little cranky about the people who hate them, then you will never be able to achieve that power, because you are alienating vast swarms of potential supporters.

    The left strives to work its supporters into a foamy-mouthed frenzy, often over nothing real, while the establishment right strives to keep its supporters quiet, even as the left targets them for impoverishment or worse. Hence, Trump.

    That said, I strive to be civil and I think everyone else should too. No one should ever be pointlessly rude or nasty- but sometimes there is a point.

    I was born in Canada and I am barely old enough to remember the putative father of the present Canadian Prime Minister and not fondly. Young Justin looks nothing like him. His family apparently idolized Fidel Castro- despite the ugly fate of Cuba- and I have no reason to think the present Canadian regime wishes any different outcome for Canada.

    I will give Justin Castro all the respect he deserves, which is none.

  28. The entire fiasco in Ottawa could have been avoided by simply busting everyone for parking offences.

    Apparently this never occurred to your regime, so instead they decided to “cancel” the protesters so they would never be able to work or have a bank account again.

    Much like how the globalists ruling the West decided they would “cancel” Russia after poke-poke-poking that country into invading you-know.

    Yet on the one hand, you support Russia against your government, on the other you support your government against people merely protesting- and peacefully, I should note.

    I sense a contradiction. You should either support both the protests against Justin Castro and the Russian efforts to end the endless shelling of the Donbas, or both the Ukrainian efforts to eradicate Russian culture from Ukraine and the impoverishment of people who object to being forced to accept an experimental and dangerous medical treatment that doesn’t actually work.

    Please explain.

  29. Ginny…”In general, our professions have been losing sight of their goals – of healing for doctors, of teaching a core curriculum for teachers, of arresting criminals and supplying information to the court system for justice for police, then for lawyers.”

    I think this has been largely driven by the emphasis on education *to get credentials* rather than either education for practical use *or* for education driven by the idea that knowledge is good in itself.

    The writer Andre Maurois asserted that people who are *intelligent* but not at all *creative* tend to be eager adopters of intellectual systems and to hold to those systems even more rigidly than the originators of those systems would have. I think the vast expansion of academia has pulled in a lot of people who fit Maurois’ description.

    Henry Mintzberg (McGill University) wrote about business education:

    “MBA programs tend to attract pragmatic people in a hurry: they want the means to leap past others with experience. Techniques–so-called tools–seem to offer that, so this is what many such students demand, and what many of the courses offer; whether portfolio models for financial resources, competitive analyses for strategic resources, or empowerment techniques for human resources. Offer enough of this, and you end up with schools of business technology.”

    and

    “Technique aplied with nuance by people immersed in a situation can be very powerful. But technique taught generically, out of context, encourages that “rule of the tool”: Give a little boy a hammer and everything looks like a nail. MBA programs have given their graduates so many hammers that many organizations now look like smashed-up beds of nails.”

    and

    “Managers can certainly use a toolbox full of useful techniques–but only if they appreciate when to use each. As the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company told a group of MBA students, “My problem is that when I face a problem, I don’t know what class I’m in.””

    It’s not just B-schools and MBAs….I think the whole Wokeness thing is driven in part by eager system-adopters, the system in this case being the whole Woke worldview and its specialized terminology.

    See my related post When Formalism Kills:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/42905.html

  30. I understand why Russia thinks it faces an existential threat. The attack planned in Feb by the Azov forces into Donbass was why he thought he had to fight. That was pure CIA, as is this entire conflict.

    That does not mean I support anyone. I recognize the facts.

    The halfwit truckers just continued the selfish anti vax freedom nonsense, that is so popular among populists everywhere. One friend is probably alive as i was quite harsh with one local anti vax guy, and convinced him this was crap. He has 4 vaccinations now and survived a nasty bout of Covid probably because of this. He is heavily compromised by accidents and obesity.

    I oppose most of Canadian policy these days, but the efforts made to protect us from Covid, were far more successful than your country’s pitiful effort.

  31. I remember a scene from “Big Bang Theory” where Penny asks Leonard what he did that day. He answers; “I thought about some things.”

    Penny; “And?”

    “I wrote some of it down.”

    This would not be the road to a positive evaluation many places and it’s starting to show. It’s really easy to count the number of lines of code someone writes in a day, far harder to tell if any of it is any good. Far easier for managers to bury themselves in minutiae than manage.

    Back in the days when the phone company was a source of revolutionary technology, there were many thousands of operators, wiremen, clerks and other mundane workers. There were also a few people that spent their days thinking about things and occasionally writing something down at Bell Labs. Beyond the Nobel prizes and many more plaudits they, more importantly to AT&T, allowed the number of calls carried on a single circuit to go from one to hundreds to thousands along with other innovations too numerous to count. But they didn’t do this on some sort of schedule or fill any quotas. All of this came to an end about the time that management decided that they just had to have leather upholstered walls for the executive suite. Not long after, AT&T became, maybe, the first well known brand to be hollowed out to hide the fact that they really had nothing to do with what they had been.

    I suppose AT&T’s fate was less ignominious than RCA and Westinghouse which are now used to cover the fact that it’s just more cheap Chineseium with an American name.

    Apple spent years and billions building their flying saucer and now the phone market is about to reengage with reality when people start to have to choose between buying a new phone that really doesn’t do anything their old phone does and buying gas and paying rent and all they have to sell is phones. Google and Face Book have also signaled that they have run out of ideas by building elaborate buildings. I wonder if they thought to include places to put the time clocks.

  32. Mike and Xennady, fair points. However, it’s not one thing or the other. Politics is zero-sum and it’s stupid to allow your opponents to tie you up in rules while they cheat. But to better understand, it helps to be dispassionate and to try to see what is actually going on behind the rhetoric. Insults and labels tend to obscure rather than clarify.

  33. He has 4 vaccinations now and survived a nasty bout of Covid probably because of this.

    Hmmm…

    PenGun, thanks for your interesting and polite reply. I’m going to respond as if you meant it for me, even though you may not have. I’m also going to speculate a bit, based upon my faulty memory of your prior statements, and I apologize if it fails me. Civility, I heart you. Hugs.

    Seriously, I do want to be civil. Anyway, my recollection is that you have described here your personal knowledge of events in Ukraine that contradict the general narrative that has been dumped upon the Western world like incendiaries upon Tokyo, circa 1945. You’re immune to all that because you have personal knowledge that the narrative is wrong.

    I want to emphasize that again- you aren’t going along with the general Ukraine narrative because you have personal knowledge that makes you believe that the narrative is not true.

    Let me move on to Covid. I have direct personal knowledge that convinces me that the narrative dumped upon us re Covid is false. You apparently do not.

    Hence, you can come here and tell us about someone has had no fewer than four vaccinations against Covid- and yet barely survived the disease, despite these supposed “vaccinations.”

    Have you thought about that? How someone can be vaccinated for a disease not once or twice but four times- and yet still almost die from it? WTF? What sort of vaccine is this?

    I’d say it’s no vaccine at all- and you think differently simply because you have no personal knowledge to suggest otherwise, not least because the Justin Castro regime works hard to ensure dissenting viewpoints are never heard.

  34. “Hence, you can come here and tell us about someone has had no fewer than four vaccinations against Covid- and yet barely survived the disease, despite these supposed “vaccinations.””

    Did you miss the part about his serious comorbidities? Without his vaccinations he probably would not have made it.

    You have a death rate at almost 4000/million and that death rate came from your disinclination to get vaccinated. That you went ahead and called this some kind of victory for freedom, speaks to the general insanity that your country embraces.

  35. “I want to emphasize that again- you aren’t going along with the general Ukraine narrative because you have personal knowledge that makes you believe that the narrative is not true.”

    Au contraire. I do have personal knowledge of the reasons this conflict started, knowledge gained from following it closely since 2014.

    The western narrative is almost completely lies.

    I can deal with this in detail should you want that.

  36. Here is some fairly recent data on covid deaths versus age and vaccination status. Reading the graphs for the most recent weeks available:

    For people 50-65, unvaxxed .95 vs vaxxed .20
    For people 65-79, unvaxxed 7.36 vs vaxxed .82

    whereas

    For people 18-29, uvaxxed .04 vs vaxxed .01

    https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status

    Better results could have been obtained if vaccine promotion had been focused on people at higher risk, ie, those who are older and/or have conditions such as obesity, rather than demanding that everyone get it; also, if the narrative that vax prevents transmission had not been pushed so stridently in the absence of convincing evidence.

    Also, there is reason to believe that the release of the vaccines was delayed in order to hurt Trump politically, which if true cost a lot of lives.

  37. Did you miss the part about his serious comorbidities? Without his vaccinations he probably would not have made it.

    Holy sweet Jebus.

    I’ll try again. Any vaccine that fails to prevent the disease it supposedly has been expensively engineered to stop- despite being expensively injected no fewer than four times- is no vaccine at all. It is at best nothing more than a revenue stream for the company that produced it.

    No one would think the polio vaccine was a success if everyone still got polio at the same rate, still killing and paralyzing roughly the same number of people- but everyone then also got a lecture about how much worse it would have been without the vaccine.

    A successful vaccine prevents people from getting the disease. It doesn’t take them to death’s door so they can then get a lecture about much worse it would have been without it, if they survive at all.

    You have a death rate at almost 4000/million and that death rate came from your disinclination to get vaccinated.

    Bovine excrement. Since I live in the US and know people here, I also know just how much nonsense gets stuffed into what passes as the American public discourse these days. A large fraction of the supposed covid deaths in the US were people already dying from something else, but who also tested positive for covid. Personal knowledge here.

    More: There was a rather famous incident in which a victim of a motorcycle accident was counted as a covid death, and I’ve been personally told of an overdose victim who was likewise counted. Of the people at my workplace, most have had covid including myself. There has been one serious case and no deaths. Of the vaccinated fraction, more than half have had long lasting side effects- including two people I know who now have heart issues.

    This is not a successful “vaccine.”

    The western narrative is almost completely lies.

    I was agreeing with you. In my view the general Ukraine narrative is that the blessed Ukies are fighting off the vile Russian orcs, which I think we both dispute.

  38. “A successful vaccine prevents people from getting the disease. It doesn’t take them to death’s door so they can then get a lecture about much worse it would have been without it, if they survive at all.”

    Except we knew nothing about this pandemic and scrambled to do something to save as many as possible. The vaccinations did not provide immunity, but did manage to save many millions of people.

    I have taken my 4 vaccinations to save my health system from melting down like yours did on many occasions. Very many people in your country died from other reasons, because your hospitals were clogged up with people who did not take the vaccine. If I have had Covid it was completely non symptomatic, and as I probably have, the vaccine worked very well for me.

  39. Here is some fairly recent data on covid deaths versus age and vaccination status.

    My problem is that I flat out believe nothing the regime says, no matter how science-y it may appear.

    The people at the CDC have every incentive to lie, including such reasons as future employment and avoiding prison for a long list of likely crimes.

    Most recently, they approved adding the covid vaccine to the scheduled immunizations for school children after a trial involving eight mice, which indicated that the vaccine didn’t even work.

    Considering that covid poses essentially no danger to children, the likely motive for this was to shield “vaccine” producers from liability for the harm they are causing.

    In other words, the folks at the CDC don’t care about the dead and maimed children that will result from this decision, they just want to protect their future employers and their stock market portfolios.

  40. You have a death rate at almost 4000/million and that death rate came from your disinclination to get vaccinated. That you went ahead and called this some kind of victory for freedom, speaks to the general insanity that your country embraces.

    PenGun returns to troll mode. Someone above made the sensible suggestion that, if people under 50 and without comorbidies had not been forced to take this non-vaccine “vaccine” the results would be much the same. I agree. PenGun likes his fascist government and that is fine. Just don’t try to make unintelligent comments about ours.

  41. Except we knew nothing about this pandemic and scrambled to do something to save as many as possible.

    I won’t disagree here.

    The vaccinations did not provide immunity, but did manage to save many millions of people.

    If the “vaccinations” did not provide immunity then how can you say they saved millions of people? And if they didn’t provide immunity, then what was the point?

    I have taken my 4 vaccinations to save my health system from melting down like yours did on many occasions. Very many people in your country died from other reasons, because your hospitals were clogged up with people who did not take the vaccine. If I have had Covid it was completely non symptomatic, and as I probably have, the vaccine worked very well for me.

    No offense, but this is all nonsense. Your health system is always melting down. It has long relied upon rationing services to the general public, while those who can go to America for treatment. Lately, your system has resorted to euthanasia to solve its problems. Watch out for that, btw. American hospitals have many problems, but from what I’ve heard they weren’t clogged by covid patients for most of pandemic. They were smacked by mandates that shut them down and led to mass layoffs of staff, and eventually the termination of employees who refused the experimental medical treatment demanded by the regime. And if you want to believe the vaccine did anything at all for you, I’d say go for it, except to note that you’re expressing a quasi-religious belief based upon nothing but feelings.

    You may as well also believe that the covid “vaccines” keep elephants out of your yard.

    Something does, right? And I bet you’ve never seen an elephant anywhere near your house, so there you go.

  42. Xennady…”My problem is that I flat out believe nothing the regime says, no matter how science-y it may appear.”

    Data from other countries shows a similar pattern.

  43. well some people notably peter daszak and ralph baric did know what they were cooking up in the wuhan lab, but curiously no progress reports,

  44. well some people notably peter daszak and ralph baric did know what they were cooking up in the wuhan lab, but curiously no progress reports, the lockdowns did not improve overall health, otherwise it would have been pursued in other instances, of course canada has 1/10th our population,

  45. “If the “vaccinations” did not provide immunity then how can you say they saved millions of people? And if they didn’t provide immunity, then what was the point?”

    Are you really this dumb? The vaccine provided a mostly neutered version of the virus, and our immune systems were able to use this to get a heads up on it. So the many people vaccinated were not immune, but had much milder experience when infected. This is why so many survived the Covid virus after being vaccinated, and why those who did not, had a much higher rate of ICU use and clogged your hospitals to the point that people with other problems died from them.

    Our system too was overwhelmed, but not to the extent yours was.

  46. Data from other countries shows a similar pattern.

    I’ve already said I don’t trust what the regime tells me- and I also don’t trust what the regime’s foreign friends claim either.

  47. The vaccine provided a mostly neutered version of the virus…

    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/different-types-of-covid-19-vaccines/art-20506465

    “Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. This type of vaccine uses genetically engineered mRNA to give your cells instructions for how to make the S protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus.”

    That’s from the link. You can look up the other variants if you choose, but I don’t think this describes anything resembling the traditional vaccine the CBC told you about.

    This is why so many survived the Covid virus after being vaccinated, and why those who did not, had a much higher rate of ICU use and clogged your hospitals to the point that people with other problems died from them.

    This is a swarm of assertions. I know I’ve read examples of supposedly clogged hospitals that were closed due to the shutdown of most medical activity, along with hospitals that were genuinely swamped. I’ve also noted that just about every possible treatment for covid aside from these emergency use authorized experiments has been attacked by the regime, including ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and even low-dose aspirin. I yet further note that the definition of vaccinated was changed so that people who dropped dead after receiving the so-called vaccine were officially counted as non-vaccinated, making the death toll look worse for that group.

    You can believe what you want, but at some point I’d had enough of this sort of nonsense and I lost any trust I had in what the CDC and the rest of these folks were telling us.

  48. LOL. You are ignorant and proud of it. America in a nutshell.

    I gave you a link to the Mayo Clinic. You responded with puerile insults.

    I’m sure your mother would be proud of you for this.

  49. She is dead. Yeah the mayo clinic says what I said, with more detail.

    I have just registered for my 5th shot. They send me an email and I pick a place, a date and time. We are almost good at this now.

  50. Penny: <>

    By this definition, just about everybody has personal knowledge of the reasons this conflict started. What you think it means is not what it actually means. You merely have opinions. What is the likelihood that your opinions are shaped by your political leanings??

  51. Yeah the mayo clinic says what I said, with more detail.

    Well no, actually it doesn’t. I’d refer you back to the Mayo Clinic website to read up on this, but I doubt you’d understand it today either.

    In any case, none of this would matter if these so-called vaccines were merely useless instead of deadly. People would take the shots and move on with their lives.

    Alas, that isn’t the case. Some unknown number of people have died because of these experimental medical treatments and much larger numbers have suffered serious side effects.

    We don’t know just how many because the regime has taken to using the armed might of the state against people who question the narrative, including its rather extensive propaganda apparatus.

    But the point is that are too many dead and maimed for the regime to get clean away with it this time, even though it has taken to inventing new mystery diseases- SADS, sudden adult death syndrome- to explain away the dead, and making such nonsense claims as global warming causes heart trouble in children. Too many people have noticed something is wrong and are reacting accordingly.

    You have not. And you can feel free to get experimented upon as many times as you like. I’ll take a pass.

  52. If you say so. ;) My car is almost in my hands`. A 2023 Subaru Solterra will be mine in a week or so. It will cost me about 15c for 6km charged into the car from a grid that is 98% clean.

    A huge saving for me.

  53. “Well no, actually it doesn’t. I’d refer you back to the Mayo Clinic website to read up on this, but I doubt you’d understand it today either.”

    Good lord you are so dumb.

    “Each COVID-19 vaccine causes the immune system to create antibodies to fight COVID-19. ”

    That is different from what I said, in what way?

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