Retired healthcare worker; now spend time in a library. Political independent but lean center right. Lives in the eastern US.
Joined November 2021
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Before William Penn founded Pennsylvania, he unintentionally got twelve jurors thrown in prison, helping to shape future American law.
In 1670 the 25-year-old Quaker stood trial in London for preaching to a street crowd. The Crown wanted a conviction. The jury denied it, finding only that he'd spoken in the street, not that he'd broken any assembly law.
The furious judge locked the jurors in a cell with no food, water or heat until they changed their minds. They came back Not Guilty. Again. And again. So he finally fined and jailed them too.
One of them, Edward Bushel, refused to pay and challenged his imprisonment. The Chief Justice ruled that a jury cannot be punished for its verdict, regardless of what the judge wants.
That principle crossed the ocean and became bedrock of American law: a jury answers to its conscience, not the state.
Not only did Penn give America a colony, he also helped give it a free jury.
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When November comes and you’re comfortable on the couch telling yourself one vote won’t make a difference, think back to the Lindsay Clancy trial.
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This looks like a photograph. It's not. It's an oil painting made in 1883 by Peder Mørk Mønsted.
It's called The Woodland Glade. Sunlight pours down through a high forest canopy and scatters across the ground in a thousand shifting patches of gold and shadow, each one placed with a precision that hardly seems possible for a human hand.
In his own day Mønsted was celebrated for exactly this. He was admired enough to travel the world and, in 1893, to be received as a personal guest of King George I of Greece, a king who had himself been born a Danish prince, painting the royal family and the countryside there.
But Mønsted had two misfortunes: he painted landscapes rather than important people, and he did it just as the art world was falling out of love with this kind of realism, deciding that all that loving exactitude had had its day.
So his name slipped almost entirely out of art history. And yet his paintings never stopped being loved: they circulate endlessly online, reposted by people who fall for a sunlit forest and, most of the time, have no idea who made it. The man has been forgotten, but the light he captured never has. Leonardo da Vinci once said it best: "A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
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A mom cornered me in my classroom last spring. Not an angry one. A scared one. She wanted to know, from me, whether the measles shot was going to hurt her kid.
That woman was not afraid because of Donald Trump. She was afraid because for three years the people in lab coats looked her in the eye and lied. She remembers every one.
Who decimated trust in vaccines, Senator? THE SCIENCE did. Fauci did.
Get the shot, you will not get COVID. Wrong. Get the shot, you cannot spread it. Walensky, national TV, March 2021. Wrong. Masks do nothing. Then mandatory.
Then DOUBLE mask. Then Fauci admitted the first line was about the PPE supply, not you. Six feet. Fauci told the House subcommittee in January 2024 the rule "sort of just appeared." It APPEARED. Like a possum on the porch. Herd immunity is 60 to 70 percent. Then 75. Then 80 to 85. He told the New York Times in December 2020 he nudged it based on what he figured folks would swallow. Not science. Just muddying the water so it looks deep. Shut the schools. Reading scores took their worst beating since 1990. I teach those kids. I am still cleaning up that mess. You are not. No link between mRNA shots and myocarditis in teenage boys. CDC conceded the signal in June 2021. "Safe and effective for pregnant women." Said with a straight face while pregnant women were EXCLUDED from the trials.
Natural immunity? Does not count. Because reasons. Lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory. Facebook banned it. Today FBI and DOE lean the other way. NIH never funded gain-of-function in Wuhan. Then NIH mailed Congress a letter in October 2021 going, well, about that. Over 8,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform were thrown out over a mandate Congress quietly repealed fourteen months later. Careers gone. Pensions gone. No apology.
Sure. All Trump. A private citizen in Florida with a golf cart.
You keep handing that man superpowers that would embarrass a comic book. What is next, he ghostwrote the CDC school reopening guidance himself... hold on, I am told that was Randi Weingarten's union emailing edits to CDC. My mistake.
Here is the number that ends this. Gallup. 2001: 94 percent said vaccinating kids was extremely or very important. December 2019: 84. July 2024: 69. Fifteen points off a cliff BEFORE RFK Jr. ever found the HHS parking lot. You cling to that Trump line the way a drunk clings to a lamppost. For support, not illumination.
The part you will not say out loud, so I will.
MMR is NOT the COVID shot. Two doses. 97 percent protection for life. Sixty years of data. I drew those up and gave them as an Army combat medic. Measles is immune amnesia, not a rash. 393 Pennsylvania cases. 70 hospitalized. That is not a talking point. That is two coffins in Lancaster County.
And that mother squints at a vaccine card because YOUR people jammed every needle on earth into one word, welded it to mandates and firings, then blacklisted anybody who raised a hand. Quinn's First Law: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You demanded blind obedience. You got the worst measles year in 35 years. Bang-up job.
Quinn's Second Law: to know what liberals are doing, watch what they accuse conservatives of. You are blaming other people for wrecking vaccine confidence. Get a mirror, Senator.
You held the HELP gavel from 2021 to 2023. Oversight over the very agencies that ran that circus. What did you DO with it? Name ONE hearing where you pressed them on ONE reversal. One. All foam, no beer. You could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions stamped on the heel.
Trust is a bank account, not a hashtag. Your side overdrew it, and two families are paying the fee.
@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks @TPUSA
LIKE this so the algorithm shows it to people who need it. SHARE it. COMMENT: which reversal broke YOUR trust first?
But what do I know. I am only a medically retired combat medic who actually gave the shots, and a science teacher who still has to explain to sixteen-year-olds why "trust me, I am the science" is not a citation.
#MAGA #Trump #Veterans
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After seeing this shared across social media for the past several months, my own words continue to hit home with me every single time.
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The pharmacy closed.
Not because of Amazon.
Because the same three men walked in and cleaned the aisles twice a month.
Diapers. Formula. Insulin. Behind the counter.
The owner filed reports. The DA declined charges. Twice.
Insurance dropped him after the fourth claim.
He sold the building to a check-cashing chain.
Now grandmothers in this town drive forty minutes for a metformin refill,
and the school bus route passes the boarded windows every morning.
Retail crime is not shoplifting.
It is an amputation performed on a town.
A pharmacist who worked forty years is stocking shelves at a big box now.
His name is on the wall of a chamber of commerce that meets in a closed building.
If the last drug store in your county went dark next month —
would "nonviolent" still sound accurate?
🤖 Made with AI
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Read my newest article. Homeless sweeps have become big business, but do nothing to help the homeless person. This whack-a-mole industry has been a boon to the Homeless industrial complex. open.substack.com/pub/trutho…
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“Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offense or from insults or from hurt feelings. It is an occupational hazard of living in society.”
— Ann Widdecombe
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J'ai regardé des centaines d'analyses sur le déclin de l'Occident. 99% finissent par tomber dans le même piège, et c'est le plus vieux piège de l'humanité : le bouc émissaire. Donnez-nous un nom, un visage, une famille, un milliardaire, une organisation. Le cerveau humain exige un coupable comme l'estomac exige du pain.
Girard a passé sa vie à documenter ce réflexe. Quand une communauté traverse une crise qu'elle ne comprend pas, elle ne cherche pas une explication : elle cherche une victime. Le sacrifice soulage, mais il ne soigne rien. Et voilà l'ironie suprême : les analystes anti-système qui hurlent un nom reproduisent le rituel le plus archaïque du système qu'ils prétendent combattre.
J'ai eu une chance rare : côtoyer beaucoup d'élites. Des fondateurs, des financiers, des politiques, des hauts fonctionnaires. De toutes origines, de toutes religions, de plusieurs continents. Et ma plus grande leçon, celle qui m'a d'abord glacé puis libéré, tient en une phrase : il n'y a aucun pilote dans l'avion.
Pas de cockpit. Pas de plan. Chacun dans la pièce croit que quelqu'un d'autre a le plan. Le régulateur de Bruxelles croit protéger les citoyens. La DRH qui déploie sa formation croit réparer une injustice. Le journaliste croit défendre la démocratie. Le militant croit sauver la planète. J'ai cherché le méchant de cinéma pendant des années. Je n'ai trouvé que des gens qui se lèvent le matin convaincus de faire le bien.
C.S. Lewis avait prévenu : de toutes les tyrannies, la plus oppressive est celle qui s'exerce sincèrement pour le bien de ses victimes. Car le bandit finit par dormir, mais ceux qui nous tourmentent pour notre bien ne s'arrêtent jamais : leur conscience les approuve.
Alors comment un système aussi destructeur peut-il exister sans concepteur ? Exactement comme une langue. Personne n'a conçu le français : des millions de locuteurs, des siècles, des emprunts, des fusions, et un ordre est apparu. Personne ne pilote une nuée d'étourneaux : dix mille oiseaux, des virages parfaits, zéro chef. Les idées fonctionnent pareil. Elles naissent séparées (une thèse de Foucault, un concept de Marcuse, une culpabilité puritaine américaine), elles fusionnent, elles mutent, elles se sélectionnent. Celles qui survivent ne sont pas les plus vraies : ce sont les plus contagieuses et les mieux défendues. Au bout de trois générations, ça donne un socle culturel que personne n'a choisi et que tout le monde respire.
Hayek a un mot pour ça : les ordres spontanés. Le résultat de l'action humaine, mais pas du dessein humain. Et voici le retournement que presque personne ne fait : le complotiste et le planificateur soviétique commettent exactement la même erreur. Tous les deux croient qu'un système complexe a forcément un pilote. L'un veut le démasquer, l'autre veut prendre sa place. Les deux n'ont rien compris à la complexité. Il n'y a pas de pilote à démasquer, et c'est précisément pour ça qu'il n'y a jamais eu de pilote à installer.
Soljenitsyne, depuis le Goulag, avait écrit la phrase définitive : la ligne qui sépare le bien du mal ne passe ni entre les États, ni entre les classes, ni entre les partis. Elle passe au milieu de chaque cœur humain. Celui qui ne cherche le mal que chez les autres a déjà perdu.
Et maintenant la bonne nouvelle, parce que c'en est une, immense.
S'il y avait un pilote, il faudrait un coup d'État, et vous n'y pouvez rien. Mais contre des idées ? Tout le monde peut tout. Une idée se réfute à un dîner. Se remplace dans une salle de classe. Se déloge dans un post, un livre, un film, un modèle d'IA. Le champ de bataille n'est pas un palais gardé : il est partout, dans chaque conversation, et chacun de nous y est déjà enrôlé.
On ne décapite pas un brouillard. On le dissipe. Avec de la lumière.
C'est pour ça que cette série attaque des idées, des livres, des dates, et jamais des hommes. Les hommes meurent, les idées restent. Foucault est mort en 1984 : son logiciel tourne encore. Pour tuer un logiciel, il n'y a qu'un moyen : écrire le meilleur programme.
Il n'y a pas de pilote dans l'avion. Alors prenez les commandes. Au travail.
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Transparency matters. Truth matters.
#SPLC #freespeech #transparency @elonmusk @Safety @Support
If you support fair platform distribution & open dialogue, please share this thread.
— @carolmswain
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Fun fact: The Declaration of Independence is the purist creed.
The Constitution is the realpolitik compromise, built for a flawed world.
Here’s the distinction.
The Declaration lays down first principles: natural rights, consent of the governed, the ends of government, and the conditions under which legitimacy breaks. It justifies revolution when authority becomes destructive, but it does not explain how a society governs itself day to day.
As a revolutionary manifesto drafted primarily by Jefferson in 1776, it proclaims “self-evident” truths like “all men are created equal” and unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is not a blueprint. It judges power; it does not run it. It reads like an indictment because it is one: a list of grievances meant to rally support, justify separation, and make the moral case to the world. That crispness is why it feels like a creed.
The Constitution is what happened when those ideals met reality.
After the Articles of Confederation exposed the failure modes, weak revenue, poor coordination, interstate friction, and a national government that could not act reliably, the founders moved from proclamation to design. They built a framework for a diverse republic full of ambition and rivalry: offices, powers, limits, procedures, enforcement, federalism, and amendment rules. Not because they distrusted ideals, but because they distrusted human nature.
This is the game-theory part. You do not assume virtue. You assume competition. So you build incentives and chokepoints. You divide power so no one can easily monopolize it. You force factions to bargain. You make it hard for any coalition to lock in permanent control. Madison says it plainly in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
And yep, it is compromise incarnate. Admirable compromises like the Great Compromise that made representation workable. Practical compromises over federal and state power. Also ugly compromises tolerated to secure ratification, including slavery-related bargains. That is what realpolitik means here. Not pretty, not pure, but built to hold together, imperfectly, in its time.
So the contrast is simple.
The Declaration states the ideal.
The Constitution builds a system that can keep going even when the people inside it are flawed.
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Today, it is common for many to use false stories to virtue signal, then unleash the most unvirtuous attacks. They are doing precisely what they accuse ICE of doing. They are using this five-year-old as bait — clickbait — to fuel protests and outrage. thehill.com/opinion/immigrat…
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#WTH Is Christian Zionism?
@marcthiessen & @dpletka talk to @ralphreed about the ideology behind supporting Israel and the erosion of it across the aisle...
🎧👇
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Few have defended freedom as consistently and courageously as Thomas Sowell 🗽
Please award Sowell the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he’s still with us! @POTUS
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My quote of the year was sent in by a listener to @TimesRadio. It’s from C S Lewis and warns of the danger of a government of do-gooders. I’d not heard it before but it’s beautifully phrased, and a bit of a foretelling of modern politics.
