How politicians leverage the seven deadly sins. How to resist. Makeup of the next generation.

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Politicians and advertisers know us all too well. They pander to human nature, which the Catholic Church characterizes by the seven deadly sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. Add fear to that, and you have a fairly thorough understanding of both commercial and political messaging.

Lust and gluttony are too expensive for politicians to leverage against us hoi polloi.  Instead, the wealthy and influential use them as leverage over politicians.  It works wonderfully.  See Jeffrey Epstein.

To manipulate us, politicians do better using low-rent greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.  The latter three are most useful for divide-and-conquer campaigns.  They split the voters along schisms such as tribe, religion and social class.  To which they added multiculturalism a couple of decades ago.  For all that people who look like me are claimed to enjoy social and educational advantages, our tribe has been pretty naïve. Most are only now waking up to the extent to which multiculturalism is a weapon against us. Having seen it coming and expatriated myself a decade and a half ago, I can afford a wry laugh.  Since here in Ukraine I look like everybody else, I can't be labelled worse than everybody else. 

Enough for wrath, envy and pride.  Going to the topic of the day, fear, greed and sloth have been the best tools for selling defense, medical and pension programs. 

Private insurers, and government wanting to implement programs paint vivid pictures of what would happen if you didn't have their protection. You would die of some cancer that you could not afford to treat. Your widow would be left destitute. Your children would be doomed to failure being unable to attend the college of their choice.

We see how well those eloquent promises work out in practice. Canadian Medicare slow rolled my friend Dan for so long that the interstitial cystitis in his lungs became inoperable. He died a decade ago. National health services will not approve heart transplants for people my age. My Vietnam friends receive atrocious care from the Veterans Administration hospitals, but cannot get free care elsewhere. In short, promises accepted on the basis of fear often turn out to be a mirage.  The "must have" college education saddles kids with a lifetime of debt and for the most part doesn't earn them as much money as a skilled craftsman.

The way to make money in the insurance game is to be aggressive both in collecting premiums and denying claims. The stories of denied claims and excessive co-pays and health insurance are legion.  Two decades back I paid $11,000 for a car that a careless driver totaled just after I bought it. Geico's original settlement offer was $6,000.  Had I been a working stiff and needed a new car immediately, I would have had to take it.  As a college educated retiree I could afford to diddle them back until they made me whole.  The experience did not engender any love for insurance companies.

Every private and public insurance scheme is freighted with transaction costs. The bureaucracy that says "no" costs a lot of money to sustain. An individual is far better off self-insuring to the maximum extent possible. How much better off? The insurance companies know.  Consider how difficult they make it to self-insure.

Laws demand that you have some kinds of insurance.  Product structure ensures that all kinds are costly.  A middle-class investor will take $10,000 risks in the stock market as a matter of course. Assuming such a person is a careful driver, it would make great sense to make a similar bet by buying $10,000 deductible car insurance. Most insurers do not offer such policies precisely because such common sense deals would not make them much money.

I have been among a small minority holding the same opinion with regard to health insurance. I cannot envision any health catastrophe costing more than a couple hundred thousand dollars that I would want to survive. I could, in a pinch, come up with that kind of money. Rather than subject myself to the indignities and uncertainties of dealing with an insurance company, I have always self-insured except when my ex-spouse bought me coverage that I didn't want and never used.

One of the great advantages of living in Ukraine is that most people don’t buy it. With no insurance companies to bilk, doctors' fees and pharmaceutical costs have had to remain pretty reasonable. Free service delivered to the poor by the government healthcare system is no worse than in the United States, and the private clinics for paying clients are pretty good.

One has to realize that whatever a politician may promise, there can never be a medical system that is inexpensive or fair. Many people went untreated, some dying, under the fee-for-service arrangement of my childhood. It was not ideal. Socialism, however, is vastly more expensive and people still die after being refused care for one reason or another. Or even worse, by having poisons such as AZT and remdescivir forced on them by the system.

Superior healthcare would have to be considered part of "white privilege" in the United States. Why, then, is life expectancy dropping among people precisely like me?  The short answer is that ubiquitous medical care, the absence of which is supposed to be a disaster, hasn't made much of a difference. The decisive factors have to do with taking care of your own health. A person needs pride in himself and a sense of purpose in life.  White men are dying of diabetes, alcoholism, overdoses and suicide because they don't find much meaning in life. Politicians use fear to push things we don't need, while they take away what we do: self-respect.

In this connection, I note that female life expectancy in Ukraine approaches that of the United States while male life expectancy is a decade less. Male and female bodies aren't that different. It obviously has a whole lot more to do with depression and alcohol than it does with the level of medical care.

That's my take on fear as a motivator. Another motivator is pride, or self-image. Justin Trudeau tells us over and over that we are selfish, racist, ignorant, unacceptable and extremist if we don't submit to the jab.  And get our trucks out of his face and go home.  Global warming, sustainable development, affirmative action, reparations, and other causes appeal to our obligation to our fellow man.  The implication is that we are not honorable citizens of the world if we don't see things their way.

Article 25 of the UN's Universal declaration of human rights imposes open-ended obligations on the signatory governments.  It reads: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."  This is lunacy. Ensuring such rights would be impossible, and giving government the power to seize and redistribute our money in the attempt is tyranny. Not coincidentally, it is precisely the kind of tyranny we are fighting right now.

There is a moral in the story. Whenever somebody tells you how they are going to save the world by compelling you to give up some of your money or freedom, watch out! Keep a tight hold on both your wallet and your freedom.  Don't be moved by teary-eyed tales of starving polar bears, dying coral reefs, Grandma dying of Covid she caught from her unvaccinated granddaughter, or that Uncle Heber would be alive today if only America had had a national health service. They want to control you. By persuasion if possible, but coercion if necessary. That will to control us is on full display right now in 2022. 

And do your homework! The polar bears are doing okay. The coral reefs have been there for 400 million years and will outlast us. Grandma is much more likely to die from the jab than the disease. Gov. Cuomo and national health services consciously used Covid to pare the pension rolls of "useless eaters." Don't trust them!

Greed plays a role. A couple of lawyers I knew moved their families from suburban Maryland into Washington DC to take advantage of the benefits for handicapped children. The scam was to get their kids diagnosed with some disability so the District of Columbia government would pay for them to attend private school. The program was of course intended for other than well-off lawyers, but that's who had the brains and the chutzpah to take advantage of it. More than just use it – brag about the fact. Advise that I get my kids' therapists and schools paid the same way.  They saw no inconsistency between squeezing Washington's working class out into the suburbs via high taxes and exploiting the benefits funded by said taxes.

Every government program has unintended consequences. Not unintended by everybody! The interest groups that support the legislation can predict fairly exactly what's going to happen. My Maryland dentist, Dr. Abel, told me that the doctors expected a windfall when Medicare was enacted.  The medical corporations knew otherwise. He was glad dentists were left out. 

Glad indeed.  Federal involvement took away a doctor's right to practice medicine as he saw fit. The paperwork burden became so vast, and the insurance so onerous that most doctors were forced to join group and corporate practices. During this Covid pandemic it has taken a brave doctor – it also helped to be close to retirement – to call the government nonsense for what it was.  They risk having their medical license revoked for prescribing cheap and effective drugs such as hydrоxychloroquіne and іvermеctin. Doctors rue the day greed led them to welcome government involvement.

That's fear, pride and greed.  Most significant may be sloth.  The common man will take a politician's word (skillfully crafted by lobbyists) for things because he is unable, or simply too lazy to think through himself. We are just now figuring out how much we have been had in this regard. We took the politicians' word at face value that we needed "two weeks to flatten the curve." We accepted masks. Many have long accepted that childhood vaccines are essential. We accept that there is no alternative to having central banks manage our money. We accepted that the Patriot Act was essential to combat terrorism – little expecting that parents who got up in arms about what school boards are up to would be reported as terrorists. Ordinary people don't read proposed laws – even Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare "We have to pass it before will have time to read it." If there were ever an "act in haste, repent at leisure" moment, that was it.

That concludes my analysis of how politicians have used the seven deadly sins, plus fear, to coax and force us into the situation we find ourselves in today. If we don't want to put ourselves in the same box next time around, we need to repent and take control of our lives. Don't let the politicians manipulate us.

Probably a majority of you readers have been obliged to take the Covid 19 injection. Pfizer and Moderna include graphene oxide, which is universally considered to be bad for you and responds to 5G wireless. What to do about it?

Today, for the third time, a list of antidotes shows up in my mailbox. It's always pretty much the same things, and serendipitously, turns out to be the same inexpensive stuff I have been taking (successfully so far) to hold off the virus. Cheap, helps your general health, and deflects Covid as well as getting rid of graphene oxide. What's to lose?
   NAC (N Acetyl Cysteine) or Glutathione but NAC is preferred
    Zinc
    Vitamin D3
    Astaxanthin
    Quercetin
    Milk Thistle
    Melatonin (taken right before bed)

Coming up, my thoughts on the politics of people who won't get depopulated by all this.  It won't be random.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and the children can best avoid trouble by demonstrating an above average zeal for learning how to read and write.

Graham