Homecoming to Toastmasters. Tenaciously clinging to opinions. Mounting evidence.

20220130

Yesterday was a wonderful homecoming. The first time I visited my Toastmasters club in more than three months. They asked me for a theme as I serve as ToastMaster for our birthday party next week. In suggesting Sweet Sixteen, I flashed back to the 1950s when that was about the time the kids started to date. I got my drivers license on my 16th birthday and had a date that night with Nancy Wall. Sweet memories.

Kyiv had been declared a red zone, where you needed papers to board the Metro or enter a restaurant. I simply didn't want to play that game. Then I got sick with a persistent cold, the family came down with Covid, followed by one thing and another.

About 25 people showed up. The atmosphere was just the same as always. One woman kept her mask on, but the rest of us were totally normal.

It's hard to say I have a favorite woman at that club. They are all warm and attractive. Mila appeals to me because she is about Oksana's age and also the mother of three. When I broached the subject of vaccines she shuddered. Her sister, a cardiologist in St. Petersburg, has told her about the damage she has seen. No way! She and her family are not vaccinated. Another in the club said slyly she had a fake certificate and could help me get one.

I was doubly encouraged. I had read that it was hard to avoid the jab in Petersburg. Apparently not impossible. It also confirms to me that despite the establishment's domination of the media, there are still some skeptics. Not many, however, with regard to the war.

I got pushback when I ventured the opinion you have seen here that Washington is trying to force Moscow and Kiev into a war. No! They insist. Putin wants war! How do you know that? He invaded in 2014!

I have to concede that he snatched Crimea and sponsored the uprisings that led to the "People's Republics" in the East and triggered the present war. That was no doubt aggression. On the other hand, he did not send in the Russian army and did not press the war out from the major cities within two eastern oblasts to the rest of Ukraine. The lines have not changed since 2014.

I further said that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to the Minsk Accords. What happened before is history. Many American writers agree that Ukraine has not held up its end of the Minsk bargain.

I am doing something heretical here. I am including a link to Russia Today to give Russia's perspective. Does that make me a traitor? I am merely suggesting that the press from "our side" may be presenting a biased point of view, and it is worth reading the other side's biased point of view as well. If you don't want it from Russia, you can get it from Americans Victor Davis Hanson, Paul Craig Roberts and Pat Buchanan. We should answer in our own minds the points that Russia makes. Sadly, even making such a suggestion that we might try to see the other guy's point of view makes me suspect.

From my point of view Ukraine does not need any more American armaments to maintain the status quo. In shipping in billions of dollars worth of military equipment the United States is throwing fuel on the fire. Some of our NATO allies such as Germany seem to agree; they have said that they do not want their munitions forwarded to Ukraine.

On the diplomatic side, the threat of imminent invasion seems to be getting stale after three months. Do something already! The people may be losing their sense of panic!

I have resisted the State Department's strong suggestion that American citizens leave the country. The British and Australians are asking their citizens to do the same. The European Union is staying put and is somewhat miffed with the Anglosphere for turning tail.

On the other hand, the population does seem to be getting moved. Oksana says lots of people have their bags packed, ready for the balloon to go up. Our babysitter is talking about moving to Riga to be with her great aunt. My opinion is that in the year it would take to sell her apartment the situation will resolve itself one way or another. The exchange rate has deteriorated a couple of percent over the last couple of days.

People are tired as well of hearing about the vaccines. When Oksana tells her friends that I am opposed to them, she says they dismiss me as "a priori stupid" and don't want to even consider the evidence. Quite a bit has been written about the psychological aspects of the Johns Hopkins Event 201 rehearsal for this pandemic that took place in October 2019. They understood our psychology pretty well.

Inflation is here. A couple months ago my favorite baker introduced a family sized loaf of bread, about 18 inches long, for 70 hryvnya. Half a loaf for 35. So yesterday I bought half a loaf and handed the lady a 50 hryvnya bill. Where's my change? There was none. The price had jumped from 70 to 100 – about $3.50 – overnight. Prices are creeping up on everything else.

Ukraine is an agriculture exporting country. Despite the chaos brought by this virus, I'm sure that they are still shipping a lot to the West and this is a reflection of universal inflation. The increase in the cost of natural gas, and hence fertilizer, and of petroleum for farm equipment certainly plays some role.

It sounded like science fiction when Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab talked about it in years past, but a Spanish doctor reports that vaccinated people seem to be embedded with MAC codes. His computer's Bluetooth sees people coming before they open his office door.

MAC codes are the things that help your devices find your computer. At 48 bits they are big enough to uniquely identify everybody in the world a thousand times over. There have been reports for months about the inexplicable inclusion of metal particles and graphene oxide inclusions in the injections. However, getting unique numbers into everybody and making them electrically active seems to me to be a big challenge. I will leave it to others to describe how they might do it.

Returning to the realm of the real, there are lots of reports on the Internet of pathologists and undertakers reporting weird things in the bodies they handle. Englishman John O Looney and American Richard Hirschman are two. The retired chief pathologist of Germany is a third.  You might need an alternative search engine to find them.

I've been referring to myself as a deplorable.  I add unacceptable in solidarity with Canadians. The multi-tentacled octopus that controls our corporations, media, law enforcement, schools, universities, government administration, legislature and courts at the national and in many cases the state and local level has made it very difficult to protest. A great many people have lost their jobs. Online commenters have lost their platforms. Email has been censored. Telephones are wiretapped. People have been entrapped by intelligence agencies. The Canadian truckers' convoy somehow sidesteps the many, many tools of suppression that have been put in place.  Rather like the January 23 protest against the mandates on Washington's National Mall.

The hypocrisy of the Canadian Broadcasting System, asking them to try alternative means of protest, is breathtaking. They have been trying to find those alternative ways for two years. They have been an incredibly long time galvanizing. Likewise pathetic is Justin Trudeau's characterization of them as a "small fringe minority" with "unacceptable" views.  Trudeau has called the unvaccinated "racist and misogynistic extremists."  This has nothing to do with race or gender, idiot!.  The above-named powers have done everything they could to isolate and fragment people who disagree. This is not a fringe whatsoever – it certainly underrepresents the people who have had a craw-full of nasty government dictates.

During the past two years, none of the promised benefits of the vaccines have materialized. They do not prevent disease or transmission. They are not safe and effective. More and more people are becoming ill and dying. None of the freedoms that have been taken away have been permanently restored. What used to be human rights are now privileges granted quixotically and temporarily by all-powerful governments.

It may be too little too late. These artificial spike proteins are already incorporated into most people's bodies, slowly eroding their immune systems. However, nobody knows the ultimate outcome and we can hope for the best. Just to repeat, the things that would prevent Covid seem also to protect your body against the vaccines: zinc, vitamins and a healthy diet.

Eddie won the impromptu speaking contest yesterday. It was a well constructed speech that took most of the allotted two minutes. I am proud of my son.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women good-looking, and the children actually do seem above average.

Graham