Where We Are This Week 09/15/2023
Panning for truth: revelations about Covid-19 and JFK, our aging democracy, brick laying, and a bonus lightning round.
It’s the season of projects at the Arnolds’. Currently, I’m in the midst of laying a paver brick patio on the back of our house.
It started with excavating a 175 square-foot patch of earth by hand, laying gravel then sand, and finally, laying paver bricks one by one. It’s a lot to do for one guy - and even more for a guy who has to borrow a truck for everything. Can’t put a cubic yard of sand in the back of my Impreza, now, can I?
The project is a literal reminder that a big project starts with the smallest of increments. I thought I was halfway when I got to the part where I could lay the bricks down, but, that assessment was made in my naiveté, this phase has been the bulk of the labor.
Everything’s daunting when you first start. Conquering the white of a blank page or canvas is intimidating, but after you make your first mark, insignificant as it is, your journey has begun, and little by little, you make progress.
700-something bricks later, my project is almost done. Finishing any endeavor is difficult, the middle section is nice as you can get lost in the labor of it all, but the hardest part is starting.
What is evident, however, is that is possible to build the thing you imagine. All you have to do is lay it down in front of you, brick by brick.
Congressional Nursing Home
Well, here it is, folks. The good news you’ve all been waiting for: Nancy Pelosi has announced her intention to seek reelection in 2024. Pelosi, 83, has held her representative post in California since 1987. Only recently did she recuse herself from potential House Speakership and the Democratic leadership position when she ceded the position to New York’s Hakeem Jeffries.
What was evident to most of us the last couple of years was that despite not holding the title of head honcho amongst the Dems, Pelosi was still steering the ship. The idea that Jeffries would be allowed to guide the vessel through the choppy waters of Congress was unspeakable as long as they had Pelosi’s three decades of experience at their disposal.
Sure, Jeffries might be the Minority Leader in name but his responsibility is akin to that of Dwight Schrute’s when he took hold of the wheel on the booze cruise.
Personally, what I’m looking forward to is more insight into the different types of luxury ice cream products Nancy Pelosi keeps in her $24,000 freezer. I’m always on the lookout for a new, frozen late-night snack, and I hear that she’s got the goods in spades. If not shopping advice, maybe she could at least elucidate to the public how she’s maintained such massive success in the stock market all these years.
What’s really unfortunate, however, is that she stands no chance of losing; her seat in Congress will eventually be buried with her and the district will likely be dissolved altogether. How will the Bay Area continue on without her?
Ah, San Francisco. Land of Ken Kesey and Thrasher Magazine, you never fail to disappoint.
What I can say for the incumbent, however, is something I can’t say for every elected official in America. At the very least, Nancy Pelosi still obviously possesses her mental faculties. Though, she was born five years before the end of World War II, and will be 84 before she starts her inevitable next term, so, I can’t guarantee how much longer she’ll have them. But, for now, she can lord that above her peers and opponents across the aisle.
When the founders devised a democracy chosen ‘by the people’, I’m not certain this is what they had in mind; whole slates of incumbent politicians hanging on to their posts for the last half - or majority - of their adult lives. After the 2022 midterms, the 118th Congress is officially the second oldest in our nation’s history - the 117th Congress currently holds the record.
While the inordinate amounts of power and influence sitting members of the House and the Senate wield is an affront to democracy, it’s not quite as bad as the incapacitated officials we have staggering around Washington DC. Mitch McConnell is giving every public appearance of his a lengthy, uncomfortable intermission, Dianne Feinstein’s given her daughter power of attorney over her personal affairs - don’t tell her that, she doesn’t remember - and her staff jurisdiction over her Senatorial duties, and Joe Biden is only tangentially aware that he is still serving his first term as President of the United States.
The mental and physical degradation of these members of government is painfully obvious to the average American citizen yet few DC officials are willing to criticize their beleaguered counterparts. Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna called for Feinstein to retire given her lack of ability to perform the position she was elected to do. Khanna’s criticism was met with accusations of misogyny and sexism from within his own party. Reasonable.
Meanwhile, Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley have pointed out the ludicrousness of McConnell’s impaired state. Two weeks ago, he froze in a public event yet again, but the Senate physician maintains that it was only dehydration. Silly me, I often forget how the Capitol Rotunda is akin to the Sahara Desert. Someone get the man some water!
Despite his constant dehydration, McConnell’s intention is to run for reelection next year as well. Goody.
When Biden was running for President, I was confounded as to why a near-80-year-old man, who’d already unsuccessfully run for executive office multiple times in his decades-long career, would still covet ascension in his old age. He’d already won the real racket, anyway. He managed to stick around DC longer than almost anyone, and make millions of dollars off the backs of the taxpayer and corrupt business dealings - and no, I’m not even referring to his involvement with his son. What more could a guy want, why not retire and spend what little you have left of your undignified life with your family and six seven grandchildren?
Ambition and egocentricity is the answer. It’s the only conclusion one could make about any of these politicians who have everything but continue to scratch and claw for more.
It’s like the bruising reality in sports when the manager selects the injured superstar over the benchwarmer. A hamstrung Kobe Bryant was always going to be chosen over Sasha Vujacic in the Lakers’ 2009 championship run. The only problem with this analogy is that none of these elected officials are remotely capable of dropping 80 points on their congressional counterparts - but they’re delusional enough to think that they are.
The losers of this whole situation are without a doubt the American people. Our rapidly aging and debilitated Congress is more interested in serving themselves than the electorate. The real winner, however, is Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman is a minor blood clot away from a second stroke and clearly is still recovering from his last health scare, but in comparison to his craven comrades, he’s in fine fettle. While McConnell stares blankly at a gaggle of reporters and Biden is ushered offstage by aids, Fetterman can quietly go about his own stroked-out business.
As much as I’d like government officials to shoulder the bulk of the blame here, it’s undeniable the responsibility the American voter has for our current calamity. Come November, it bares remembering, a truism of which I can’t believe anyone would need reminding, that you get that for which you vote.
Lightning Round
I thought last week was a little bit of a slow news week, but this week has been nothing of the sort. There was too much I wanted to get to this week, so instead, I offer you a short intermission in the form of a lightning round.
United Auto Workers are set to strike starting on Friday, the 15th. There’s that public strike I was hoping UPS workers would get around to this summer. 146,000 auto workers strong.
Speaker McCarthy has announced that the House will be undergoing an official impeachment inquiry of President Biden. And thus, the suicide pact between Republicans and Democrats is agreed upon. All future presidents henceforth will be impeached without impunity.
In a fight between McCarthy and the more right-leaning members of the GOP House, it appears that a government shutdown is imminent and unavoidable. For the Freedom Caucus cohort of the party, obstruction is the name of the game.
Mexico had aliens inside their congressional body. A journalist and UFO researcher presented mummified bodies of aliens to lawmakers this week in what’s either a hoax or an elaborate trolling of the goings-on inside the American Congress. Mexico couldn’t let us have all the fun, could they?
Bad couple of weeks for Apple as China banned government officials from using the iPhone, and more recently - and more concerning - is that France banned the sale of the iPhone 12 as it exceeded radiation levels deemed acceptable by the French government. Poisoning your mind and body!
The Biden Administration exchanged prisoners with Iran in a like-for-like swap. Also, going the way of Iran in the deal was $6 billion of seized funds that they now promise they definitely won’t use to build nukes, kill their citizenry, or destroy Israel—nothing of the sort.
And thus concludes our lightning round. Back to your normally scheduled programming.
Fool’s Gold
The truth is a relative term these days, isn’t it? Your truth, my truth, the truth, etc. The American public has atomized into unverifiable solipsism so much so that objective reality hardly seems to extend past our own noses.
I’m sure there used to be a thing we called objective reality but maybe that was in our imagination all along; perhaps that’s what Biggie Smalls meant when he rapped, “It was all a dream.” Once upon a time, there were things we all agreed upon. But who’s to say if that was the truth.
Save for the political sycophants - and there are still plenty of those - the amount of trust the average American has in public institutions has dramatically waned since the 1970s. Of course, faith oscillates up and down if the respondents’ party of choice is in power, but the general trend is one of steep decline.
Gone are the days of three television channels, reputable national newspapers, and credible local journalism. As the years have worn on - and the advent of the internet - we’ve retreated into our own corners with our collection of news sources and entertainment. So, depending on your combination of cable TV, streaming, news and substack subscriptions, and your social media algorithms, your conception of the (T)ruth can be radically different than that of your neighbor.
And rightfully, so. At this point, there are endless amounts of inputs and sources that it’s nigh impossible for two individuals to agree on what set of facts they can include in any given debate.
While most people would tell you how that’s a bad thing - and it very well may be - that’s not what you’ve collected me in your little corner for, is it? In Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, there’s a scene where he’s detailing Berlin, Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. In the aftermath, a couple of intrepid Argentinians had traveled there to revel in the temporary anarchy before whatever government was about to grab hold.
We find ourselves in the same position as those South American travelers. Yes, institutions and official narratives are crumbling all around us - but maybe, now, is the time we can actually locate a new truth, and ideally, the (T)ruth.
For instance, just this week there have been several revelations about long-held institutional narratives. One of the former Secret Service agents tasked with protecting J.F.K. has confided to the New York Times something that might upend the entire ‘magic bullet’ theory of the president’s assassination. Paul Landis, the agent in question, has shed new light on where he found the bullet that was supposed to have killed Kennedy and, then, injured John Connally in four different locations on his body.
Landis, who was never questioned about the incident - what? - now asserts that he found the bullet lodged in the seat of the limousine behind the president contradicting the Warren Commission’s findings that the bullet was found with Connally. With the testimony of one witness, a five-decades-long narrative, tenuous as it was, is entirely overturned.
Also this week - it was a busy week - a CIA whistleblower has testified to Congress that the Agency deliberately misled the American public on the origins of Covid-19.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” wrote the Chairmen.
I didn’t grow up in the golden era of faith in the government or intelligence agencies, so if you’re just now arriving to the party: welcome! If you’d like an excellent primer on reasons to distrust the CIA at all times, I highly recommend reading Tom O’Neill’s excellent book CHAOS.
Next thing you know, I’ll be telling you about how a Saudi Arabian spy knew of the plans to orchestrate an attack on America on 9/11, even aided two of the perpetrators of said attack, and that FBI agents were aware of his presence inside the country well before September 11th, 2001. Well, I am telling you just that.
But, that’s not even news. That’s the result of a report that was finally declassified in 2021 through an executive order by President Biden; the pages containing the link between the assailants and the Saudi spy were originally ordered to be kept secret by President Bush. While mainstream media and government glossed over the report’s declassified findings, the unadulterated version of the 510-page report is buried in plain sight in the annals of the internet. It’s just a calculated Google search away.
It’s the Wild West out there for objective reality. It’s 1849. Gold, rumors of gold, and cheap imitations abound, but if we take our chances and go upstream, we might find ourselves a little bit of the most precious substance around. With a little luck and a little grace, we might even be able to hang on to it.
To a better next week.
Cheers,
~FDA
Hahaha, I’ve given up on Gold, just looking for Copper at this point.