Upon returning from vacation, while my wife and children gently settle in to our lovely little house, I begin to rapidly swirl through the property, following a predictable progression from unpacking to small projects to finally finding something to bang my head against and become extremely frustrated and then despondent.

Vacation provides a much-needed break from the rigors of daily life, which steadily drag me down and drive me to seek relief in beers and cigarettes at the end of the day when the children are finally in bed and the kitchen is clean once more.  On vacation, we often choose to leave our pouch of tobacco at home, and rarely miss it while we’re away, and tend to go to bed early and gradually build up momentum of solid sleeps and daydreaming about which direction to steer our lives, so that when we return I’m invigorated and ready to take life by the horns.

Our house always feels bigger than I remember it, and our neighborhood more lovely.  Yesterday, after returning from a beautiful weekend in New Hampshire, I stood in the driveway watching yellow leaves drift through the air and the sunlight on the furrows of brush-hogged grass on the hillside, and thought “this ain’t so bad”.  I unpacked the car with perfect efficiency, carrying items to the garage on my return trips, and soon had it emptied and closed the hatch and rolled the big suitcase into our bedroom for later (I’ve never once gone so far as to unpack the actual suitcase the day we get home).  While standing behind our boy so he could play in his favorite upper cabinet, I began shaking a spray foam gun and eyeing the gaps around the drywall in the laundry room that I’ve been meaning to seal for seven years.  Soon I was at work, filling gaps, moving the step stool while our boy clambered up from behind, holding the gun at the perfect angle and letting out just the right amount of foam.  I finished the laundry room and immediately remembered the new exhaust duct in the kitchen, slid the stool to the corner cabinet and got right to work, emptying the top shelf of the lazy susan with one hand while shaking the can with the other.  Access to the back side of the duct was blocked by the top shelf; not to be denied, I left the baby standing on the top step of the stool and calmly strode to the basement stairwell and grabbed the large flathead screwdriver I knew lived in the bottom of my household toolkit.  I lowered the top shelf, foamed some more, and again was denied access—this time by the central rod of the contraption.  Without a word of frustration, I calmly noted the philips heads of the screws anchoring the assembly to the cabinet ceiling, and returned to my toolkit for the drill, already equipped with a philips bit.  Down came the tiny screws and in went my foam gun again; I stood with one foot on the counter, hunched over and stretched out at the same time, depressing the trigger to pump expanding foam into the unseen gap behind the duct.  My son called for miscellaneous items on the counter before him, and without letting off the trigger I reached down and shoved spice jars and spatulas into his reach.  I was a man possessed.  I made three important phone calls in a row.  I delivered my Mom’s groceries, separated from our cooler, to her apartment upstairs.  I screwed on two final slats to the railing ‘round the platform of our newly-acquired play structure.  Is there nothing I couldn’t check off the list?

Finished with the foam, the can itself empty, I took it to the garage to service the gun, which was encrusted with cured foam from a faulty valve on the head of the can that had exploded when touched by the gun’s screw cap.  I laid out a sheet of cardboard on the garage floor and donned a pair of rubber gloves, then doused the assembly thoroughly with foam gun cleaner spray.  I picked at the cured foam with a plastic spoon and then a random steak knife that lives in the pen cup on the workbench, but every time I went to unscrew the gun from the can, the top of the can spun too, fused to the gun.  More spray, more hacking, more useless spinning.  I felt the cold sting of the solvent through my flimsy gloves and went for a rag.  I grabbed large channel-lock pliers and a massive crescent wrench from my metal toolbox, and applied them to the can.  Unable to get proper purchase on the plastic cap of the canister, the whole top spun together.  Frustration began to mount within me.  I sprayed more, hacked more, tried again to get a grip.  I began to curse.  “You pig”, I said.  “You fucking pig”.  I thought about how my voice might carry from the closed doors of the barn, continued my struggle, and continued to curse.  The weighty crescent wrench tempted me to smash the can, but I considered the risk of a pressurized vessel and held back.  But I laid into it with my words.  Frustration turned to despair.  “This is why I smoke”, I said.  “Because I have to deal with this fucking shit”.  “You fucking pig”, I said again.  I again resisted the urge to bring my wrench down on the can of foam, and stood and smashed instead the melamine sheet table on a pair of sawhorses, leaving a good dent.  I threw the wrench back in the box and stormed out of the garage, feeling the entire balloon of my positivity come down around me and our little .3 acre lot.

Once again, as I always do, I’d found a reason to be completely frustrated and fully reminded of why life is hard.  As usual, it was an inanimate object obeying the laws of physics that stubbornly resisted my will.  Typically, it was something related to this ancient house or some chore of Vermont living that I resent.  Some tiresome task that falls to me as a matter of maintaining our lives here.  When I’m retired and living in a pristine condo in Arizona, what will I find to burst my bubble of vacation optimism?

I just updated the “About” page on the site, and took a little look at my recent posts—most from about two years ago. I’d forgotten about how fired up and cynical I was about the coronavirus and the vaccine.  I know these aren’t exactly shining examples of calm and level-headed writing (or, in the case of the podcast, speaking), but I’ll leave them there as evidence of where I was.

I don’t think I was far off with much of those opinions, and I haven’t changed my stance on the events that began to unfold in March 2020, but I certainly don’t feel so angry or afraid anymore.  At the time, I felt like a solitary voice screaming against a thousand people all telling me to be quiet and that I’m crazy.  Not a good feeling!  I was afraid for myself and my family.  I was afraid that I’d have to take an injection in order to access goods and services or bring home income to support my family.  I remember thinking at one point that I’d do it if I had to, as long as the rest of my family could get by without it.  I’d go earn the money and go to the grocery store to buy the bread.

I’m not so afraid anymore, and I’m not so concerned with what other people think.  Back then it seemed like the tide of public opinion would make or break the future that we all must live in, and if we couldn’t all agree that people shouldn’t be coerced into unwanted medical procedures, then we were doomed to become slaves incapable of growing food or reproducing without approval and assistance from the State.

I think I have more confidence now in myself and my family and God, such that whatever happens out there in clown world, I know that we will be okay.  And while the writing is on the wall as to where the social engineers would like us to go, there’s still time to be an old-school human exercising free will and creating things that machines will never understand and can never control.

Miles Mathis on the current housing market:

HGTV: It seems like a pretty harmless television network, right? But it’s actually a fine-tuned social engineering project that heavily promotes the idea that houses should be investment vehicles, earning you money. This is part of the essential lie of speculative capitalism, that you can create wealth disproportionate to the amount of effort you put into it. Did it ever make sense that doing a $50,000 renovation to your house increases its value by $100,000? Does another $50,000 of real value magically get created? No. But this is the kind of endless mad dash for profit that gets created by the interest-based banking system. And that’s what HGTV is designed to do for the housing market. It fetishizes homes to arbitrarily increase their value, turning what is normally a depreciating asset into an investment. What does that do in real terms? It eviscerates communities as everyone constantly buys and sell houses, never living in one place long enough to form neighborly bonds. And do you know who’s behind HGTV? It was founded by Kenneth Lowe and Susan Packard and has since been sold to Discovery, Inc., whose majority shareholders are…

Vanguard, BlackRock, JPMorgan, etc. Think about that: the same people behind the housing market are behind HGTV. Do you think this is a coincidence? Meanwhile, they make it harder and harder to buy a house, making you work harder. It’s a feeding frenzy that goes round and round, and if you buy into it, it turns you into a miniature version of them: a little speculator and landlord perpetuating their predatory system of speculation and landlordism. But no matter how rich you get acting like them, they will always get richer off you. That’s what the banking system does, and that’s why you’ll never catch up with them. Better to get out of the race altogether. Be as NIMBYish as you can possibly be, not because you’re trying to protect your real estate investment, but because you’re trying to protect your home and your neighborhood, two things which sit at the heart of everything good in this world. Why do you think the rulers are trying to buy up the housing market? Because a little family in a little house on a little street that hasn’t changed in 50 years is the biggest threat of all to their hegemony. If you don’t think that’s true, then you still don’t understand the true nature of the war that’s going on around you.

Read the full article here: http://mileswmathis.com/housing.pdf

We went shopping at the big supermarket in our closest big town yesterday, and got to load up our cart with an abundant haul of fruit, veggies, pickles, organic meats, and a few of our favorite snacks and indulgences. Almost everybody was mask-free, including the employees, which is a welcome change. It takes a little getting used to, seeing people’s faces again. I’d gotten accustomed to being the only maskless person in most stores, but now suddenly we’re all maskless. All except for the children of course. Our baby girl of four-and-a-half months, riding in a carrier on Mom’s chest, gets a pass, and charms all the other shoppers—especially a man wearing a bright-red Xfinity t-shirt in the checkout next to us (she loves the color red, and particularly men wearing the color red). We saw two other babies sitting up in shopping carts, also mask-free. All of the children walking under their own power, however, were wearing masks—per CDC guidelines—accompanied by parents or caretakers without masks.

How did we reach a point where people are readily demonstrating their willingness to sacrifice their children to authorities? Putting a mask on your child, while you enjoy the sweet freedom of breathing fresh air and interacting as a human, is like holding that child up naked to the maw of the beast and bowing your head and saying “here—you may have my child if you so desire”. I can imagine the saliva dripping from that maw, the slow grin of satisfaction at this fresh life being offered up for their enjoyment. “Ah yes”, says the beast, “we’ll start with a little injection”.

I have to imagine that most adults—or at least a good portion of adults—must be enjoying the feeling of not having to wear a mask in public. Perhaps they’re thinking “ahhhh, this is nice. Finally back to normal!”, and as they stretch their arms in satisfaction, maybe buy some tickets for a summer concert, and take the mask off of their rearview mirror, they turn to their children and say “Sorry bud, you’ve got to keep yours on for a while longer”.

What they’re really saying is that they are willing to jump through all of the hoops they are told to jump through, and they’re equally willing to shove their children through more hoops as instructed. The evaporating mask mandates and eased restrictions, to them, are proof that the authorities are to be trusted: “See? I knew that if we all just did as we’re told, we’d get through this”. Never mind that the kids still have to wear masks.

I watched two boys move about the store with masks on, their caretaker chatting to them about snacks, their eyes darting meekly about, their entire bodies loaded with hesitancy and trepidation. I saw a dad follow his three kids into the store, all wearing masks, and his face said he’s being a good citizen by making his kids wear their masks. I remember last summer watching a dad chew out his teenage boy for not putting his mask on right away as they made their way from one end of the beach to the other. I could see him casting about, desperate to demonstrate to all the other beach-goers that he wasn’t some ignorant Trump-voting redneck, that he was “following the science” and keeping his kids in line.

Where is the concern for the actual health and well-being of one’s children? Does that factor in at all? In order to believe that the coming vaccine is for their benefit, and thereby actually believe that it makes sense for them to be wearing masks now, you would have to believe that COVID-19 presents some sort of threat to their lives. Doesn’t everybody know that children are 10 or 15 times more likely to die of the flu? Was it really as easy as all major media outlets suddenly using the phrase “rising hospitalizations among adolescents” to convince parents that their kids need this vaccine and should keep wearing masks until they can get it?

I don’t think so. I don’t think most parents actually feel like COVID-19 is likely to kill their kids, and I don’t think they actually think the mask does a whole lot to protect them (although surely there are plenty that do). It’s hard to imagine that two pillars of the narrative thus far: that children are not at risk of serious COVID-19 disease (but may simply spread it to those who are), and that masks do little to protect the wearer (but may protect others should you unknowingly be infected), can have crumbled in the public consciousness so quickly. Masks on kids now directly contradicts both of these statements. But so says the CDC, and so the parents shrug their shoulders and shake their heads and say “sorry bud, you’ve got to keep wearing the mask”.

The sickest part of this is to imagine that these parents may very well have spent the past year explaining things to their children as follows: “There’s a flu going around bud, and lots of people are getting sick and dying”, to which the child might ask “Am I going to get sick and die?”, “No sweetie, you probably won’t, but if grandma were to catch the bug, she could die, so we’re all going to wear masks for a while to make sure that the bug doesn’t reach granny”. “When will it all be over?” “Well the scientists are making a vaccine that will protect granny, and so we’ve all just got to do our part to protect her until they finish making the vaccine and she can be safe”.

Well granny got the jab in January, Mom and Dad. What now? Now do you tell your children that they are suddenly at risk of dying, and so they also need the vaccine? Were you lying to them all of last year? Do you try and cling to your role as knowledgeable authority to your children, and explain why it’s now important that they get the vaccine themselves, or why it’s now important to wear a mask to protect yourself? Do you play a Dr. Fauci and claim that you were lying to them last year when you said it was to protect granny, and that they weren’t at risk, because you didn’t want to scare them? “I lied to you for your own good, bud. Now that granny’s safe I’m gonna level with you: you were actually at risk this whole time, I just didn’t want you to be scared”. Or do you just shrug your shoulders and explain that directions from adults don’t always make sense, that even Mommy and Daddy don’t always understand why the CDC or The School or The Government tells them to do certain things, but the important thing is to just do it, because those are the rules.

My sense is that this is the big takeaway for most families: whether explicitly stated or simply left for the sharp minds of children to put together, the message is that we follow rules no matter what, that rules don’t have to make sense, that in order to be good citizens we obey orders, and in the end everything is okay.

Great! Until it isn’t. Until you encourage your son to get the vaccine in order to attend basketball tournaments, and he gets blood clots in his brain and nearly dies. , or your daughter gets the shot before returning to college, suffers myocarditis, and dies. At that point, will the government that you trusted like a parent be there to make everything okay? I don’t think so. You will be told it was just a coincidence, that your healthy child would have developed those blood clots or heart inflammation anyway. The government will offer you nothing. You will not be able to sue the criminal companies that manufactured the vaccine. You will be left with nobody to blame but yourself.