New Accusations against Senator Susan Collins Cross-Examined

ProPublica Reporter Accusing Senator Collins of Corruption Defends His Report

The Covid Mask as a Virtue Signal

Can you believe that Covid was only 6 years ago? To me it seems like it was almost forever ago, certainly not just 6 years.

So for the past 6 years we all have been seeing people in grocery stores and Walmart wearing those Covid masks, not so many now but still more than enough to make you wonder why they insist on doing it especially since it is generally understood that they don't do any good. How could they? They collect all the germs in the air you breath in and all the germs in the air you breath out and concentrate them on a thin surface of fabric through which you inhale. How can that be healthy? Then you walk into a restaurant wearing the same mask and breath out through the same filthy germ-infested thin layer of paper blowing those germs everywhere.

Some people even wear them when they are driving alone in their car. We've all seen them. That's just the thing, though. We see them doing it. They know that we can see them doing it. They don't seem to care that we see them either.

What gives?

It dawned on me last night (not that it might have dawned on me before, but it did last night) that they wear these masks to prove to themselves and to everyone who sees them that they are virtuous people, that they are good and trustworthy and obedient. It doesn't matter to them if the masks work. The masks mark these people as virtuous.

Virtue signaling works because people condition their minds to release dopamine whenever someone can see that they are virtuous.

Wearing Covid masks is a form of virtue signaling, nothing else, just a little dopamine hit whenever someone sees how superior you are.

Love, Cruelty, Shame, and Virtue

I got to thinking this morning, yes that happens occasionally, and two things dawned on me that had never come to light for me before.

First, I realized that the opposite of love is not hate the way we always imagine it to be. The opposite of love is cruelty. For love to be realized it needs to be expressed as an action, not merely as a feeling. Hate is a feeling. Cruelty is an action.

The second realization came an hour or so later. The opposite of shame is virtue. Shame exposes guilt and is therefore a good thing. Virtue hides it. This contrast is almost Orwellian.

Virtue signaling makes people with malicious intent appear to be good. 

Mary

Back in the summer of 1969 when I was stationed for a couple of months in Denver in the summertime.

A friend of mine in the school scored four tickets to a Peter Paul and Mary Concert in the famed Red Rocks Amphitheater just outside of town. I was the designated driver in my red 1964 Impala.

I had heard plenty of Peter Paul and Mary but the Red Rocks Amphitheater was a new experience enhanced by an after-dark setting and a totally full stadium, people all over the rocks on either side, a pure magic experience.

Two years later I bought the album that Mary Travers herself released called "Mary".

I later lost that album in a fire and haven't heard it since. I just found it on YouTube in a format that has kept me overfocused on control while she again sings all these amazing songs of the folk era in the end of the sixties and into 1971. My album cover was all yellow with Mary for its title. YouTube is giving the album a different cover, but this is the Mary that I first heard in 1971 in my dorm and later in the chicken house on my AR4 speakers just living the dream.

The Song Is Love

I'll save the link to that YouTube recording. This seems to be a playlist starting with this as song one.

American Christianity Revisited

No comment. This article speaks for itself:

How "Israelism" Has Replaced Christianity as the American Civic Religion

Heavy Truth on a Mountain Road

This YouTube video brings back thoughts... no, worries... that I have had on several occasions on long, steep mountain roads including this one. You go into these things thinking about the long hard climb up, how much that strains your car's engine, transmission if your car has an automatic, clutch if you're driving a manual, but eventually the part you completely ignored going into this challenge rattles your nerves.

If you're lucky and you use some common sense, you don't do all that much damage to your car, but don't be surprised if along the trip down you find yourself fighting back fear as the smell of burning hot brakes fills the passenger compartment.

Once down at the bottom and back on the highway you completely forget about that fear. You might even imagine doing it again with a few more passengers along for the ride.

I can't even imagine why I might want to try doing this in a Subaru with a CVT that just was never meant to travel 7 miles with the transmission fighting the opposite forces it was designed to master.

Think hard before taking this Sunday drive in New England:

Why the Danger on Mount Washington Is Coming Back Down

The Cleanup

I'm beginning to think there's going to have to be a major cleanup once Trump is gone.

What a mess...

Canadian Resistance Army - Lake Ontario (Official Music Video)