“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.” – Star Trek (The Cage)
After creating the Nile, God became a podcaster, “Check out my stream!”
Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
It’s a pretty simple definition, and it mostly works unless you have really persistent hallucinations. Persistent hallucinations just like Philip K. Dick probably had. This may explain a lot of his fiction and his fascination with reality. And as for 2021, I’d say reality has great graphics, but horrible gameplay.
In 2022, though, we live in a world where reality seems to be split, and split along ideological lines. One generally reliably Left member of the media (but I repeat myself), Bill Maher, just gave up on the fiction: “It’s just gone on too long, nobody cares anymore. I don’t want to live in your mask paranoid world anymore. You go out, it’s silly now. You have to have a mask, you have a booster, they scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas. I’m not bananas, you are.”
Still not on your side.
With that, the cracks of reality on where we’re at with COVID have swung wide open. There is the fiction that has the single, double, triple, and mega-vaxxed living in constant fear. The Mrs. was reading the comments to me from some Lefties on a website she frequents. One particular set of comments was of Lefties looking for test kits like they were looking for crack. One commenter had consumed at least four instant kits (without a positive result) because they were certain that they had . . . the Rona.
I have no idea what induces that level of fear in a healthy person. When one of them pointed out that they were consuming tests that could have been better used by people in nursing homes, this entirely common-sense idea was shouted down by a sea of Leftist fear.
This is a denial of reality. COVID has killed quite a few people, but it’s no Black Death. Everyone in my family has had it, and for us it ranged from two or three days in bed (The Mrs.) to an afternoon of fever (me). I’d go so far as, having had it, to bet that millions of people have had it and don’t even realize it. For two years, these people have managed to live every moment dripping in abject fear.
How a Leftist imagines a trip to COSTCO®.
Beyond the impact of the fear, there’s the impact of the Vax itself. There is more than sufficient anecdotal evidence that the mRNA shots have significantly more complications than any vaccine ever delivered. No one can say what the long-term implications are. With any luck, the negative health impacts are over more quickly than the protections offered by the shot, but there are no guarantees.
Especially not a guarantee from the manufacturer. Hmmm.
The “adverse health impacts”, of course, are being denied as well. But such an overwhelming amount of data leads to even the monolith of “jab good, deniers bad” being breached at an official level. The current shot does nothing against the current strain of COVID, and it appears the current strain of COVID leaves those that get it immune to certain other forms of COVID.
Huh. It’s almost like the virus is attenuating like, oh, every virus, ever and becoming progressively more infectious and less lethal. Even Bill Gates is ready to call this one over.
We know that Bill Gates didn’t invent COVID – none of his other products come up with new versions this frequently.
This isn’t the only reality the Left is denying. It’s not even the most important reality that is being denied.
What’s falling apart, that Leftists say isn’t?
Well, the economy, but I’ve been on and on about that, so I’ll give you a rest. Besides, Wednesday is a better day for bikini economics. For whatever reason, Biden owns the economy now. In this, I’ll give him a pass. He’s like the last player in a game of Jenga® where you know the tower is going to go, but he’s gotta try to make it one peg higher. More on that later.
Our border. The character of a country is in its people, and so is the success. I do believe that the traditions of our great nation led to the great prosperity that we had. That, and having thousands of nuclear warheads. Yeah, having great traditions is nice, but having the ability to obliterate anyone who disagrees with you never hurts.
Regardless, there’s a group that actively says that the United States, “has no culture” which is like a fish wondering what water is. The fact is that the culture of the United States was so successful and pervasive that people didn’t recognize its influence because it is literally everywhere. Is American culture perfect? No. But it certainly has remade the world, in some ways for the good, in others for the not so good.
I killed an Australian spider with my shoe. I’m glad he wasn’t big enough to carry both of them.
But if you replace the people, you’ve replaced the culture, and the Magic Dirt won’t make them prosperous. Just like if you replaced the Japanese with (spins wheel) Argentinians, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore, you can’t replace Americans with (spins wheel) Japanese and expect anything but another Japan.
The Left somehow thinks the thousands of people in the medical professions (doctors, nurses, administrators, etc.) are magically going to be replaced when they refuse the Clotshot®. No. These are skilled positions requiring education and practical training. Replace these professionals with idiots like me, and you’d end up with every solution being amputation. They don’t call me “John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon” for nothing. It did cut down on the owies my kids brought me, though.
Our relationship with each other. At every level this is breaking down. That’s not fair. At every level, people are being pushed apart. On a racial level, everyone is being taught that, even when there’s no intent, one group of people is awful and the other is blameless.
One of the most pernicious things that can be done is to create a victim class. No matter what happens, they are told, they have no responsibility. If they behave badly, well, it couldn’t be helped. Why not? Well, something happened three hundred years ago, you see.
It’s nonsense. I know Scott Adams has been taking a few lumps recently, but a while back he had a thought experiment I felt was interesting: what would happen if you asked an alien about the situation of blacks in the United States and if reparations were owed. If the alien looked over the situation, Scott seemed to think that it might say, “Well, comparing your life span, material goods, and general standard of living compared to if you had stayed in Africa, you probably owe the white people.”
Women drinking coffee. My three favorite things.
Probably not a popular idea to float in 2022, but the constant stream of victimhood replacing any sort of rational assessment will end up doing only one thing: tearing us further apart. Which is just what Leftists want.
We are on the road to many reckonings. From the looks of them, they won’t be delivered sequentially. I tend to think the big trigger will be the economy, but regardless of the trigger, there comes a point where, regardless of what we believe, reality will set in.
I hope it doesn’t have too much Kardashian.
