Observe & Retort

The year 2020 has been a perfect storm for social and political change and we are just halfway through it. It began with Jeffrey Epstein and the revelation that some of our Western leaders were involved in what is effectively being called a pedophile ring. What little faith we had in those who govern was and is further damaged as we shook our heads with disgust at what men and women in power are capable of.  Then we got smacked with COVID19 and  witnessed an over-reach of government power. The same government we all find so untrustworthy. It wasn't the social distancing guidelines, face masks, or hand-washing that those of us that are fond of liberty found objectionable, it was the shuttering of businesses and the enforcement of the guidelines as rules or law that was a blatant overreach of power and an infringement on our civil liberties that concerns us. What the government showed us in many states was that such rights they swore to defend are no longer ours, no longer inalienabl

When our country was founded the framers of its structure did not put into place term limits, but left it open for future legislators to do so if deemed appropriate. Initially our President didn't have term limits, in fact FDR was elected to a 4th term! The 22nd Amendment changed all of that on March 24th 1947 following our 32nd president's 4th electoral win in 1944, and ratified in 1951. Thirty-two president's before term limits! Something I bet most are unaware of. Some of our nations founders were okay with life-appointments for the office of president while others, such as George Mason, denounced such ideas as establishing an 'elected monarchy'. I think Mason was right and I think I can prove it. Have you ever wondered why it is that our members of congress are not subject to term limits? While I was discussing the topic with my wife, she quickly looked up the current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. She has been serving in the House since 1987 starting h

Recently I was watching a docu-series on cults and extreme religions in America and I was watching the sixth episode, which is documenting the Twelve Tribes (Est ~1977) it dawned on me that there is the potential that these extreme off-shoots of mainstream religion might point us to the inevitability that all religions are founded in similar circumstance, and are as a result, complete malarkey. We could propose a couple of things that I think would be difficult for anyone to refute. The first is, like I said above, a small group of individuals within a culture took the premise of their tribes spiritual mythology to a fundamentalist extreme. This likely happened many times, but one particular iteration possessed the right recipe to endure long enough for elders of that society to realize that the religious sect in question possessed the tools that could effectively govern a population with rules rooted in morality. The second proposal is that the resurfacing of fundamentalist sects thr

Links: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1473309920301201?via%3Dihub#fig1 https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports The Corona virus known as COVID-19 had 276 known cases on January 19th with 4 deaths and no recoveries. We were initially told to be more concerned about the seasonal flu that had around 10,000 deaths at the end of January our of over a million infected. The lethality of the flu is 0.095% (or round up to 0.1%), where the COVID-19 was estimated to have a lethality of 2-4%, or 20-40 times higher than the flu. COVID-19 has proven to be more contagious than the flu, and potentially 10x more deadly. It is far more contagious and as a result more lethal than swine flu. By comparison the swine flu had infected just a few hundred people by day 41 whereas COVID-19 h