I don’t know about you but I am in a serious search for the truth. No, I am not doing my Socrates gig but really trying to figure out if there is anyone or thing out there that I can believe in? Whether it is  government, media, business or religion, you really have a hard time saying this or that is really true.

We make our decisions and form our ethos by looking at data sets and deriving conclusions. Your thinking follows a trend and your beliefs are either confirmed or disrupted by what you perceive to be reality. In today’s world our sources of data have become suspect. You can follow blindly or constantly challenge their veracity. I choose to do the latter. 

We have had a pandemic scorch our civilization. We are mesmerized by its evilness in every part of our lives. We look for a way to make sense of this or at least to understand what we are up against. We want and need answers. We are told to follow the science, but science disagrees.

People who have spent their lives studying epidemiology, find it impossible to speak in a unified voice. Even worse we have some with dubious credentials who are now touted as specialists. And on top of all of this is politics and optics. The so called leaders might know something for a fact but they cannot let it get out for fear of panic or image ruination. What’s a guy to think?

I would like to tell you this only holds true for this once in a lifetime event. For years we have discussed climate change.

Forget about whether it is man made or not, it is happening. We are hotter, colder, wetter, drier. I happen to believe the world before we started screwing with it, is system complex far beyond our comprehension. Ice melts in the Arctic, the saline flows up the west coast of Africa on underwater currents to the Sahara and then is blown across the Atlantic to nurture the rainforests of South America. This is not Sci fi but highly observable phenomena. Yet we don’t believe. 

Let’s forget about science and move onto the Disneyworld of the Capitol Beltway. We have a multi trillion dollar infrastructure bill that the pols tell us is revenue neutral. The non partisan Congressional Budget Office just pegged that declaration off by $350 billion over ten years. A mere rounding error, you say. We have not fully spent the remnants of the last giant COVID bill.  The current one is 2500 pages long. How can you begin to comprehend not only its utility in solving  problem but how do you administer such a giant? The devil is truly in the details.  

We had an attack on the nation’s capitol on January 6. It was beyond embarrassing for us as a great nation. Despite on the spot coverage there are those that think it was just tourists acting up or at least exercising their right to free speech. Interpret it any way you want but IT HAPPENED! 

I am embarrassed and saddened by my Catholic church. For an institution that has over the centuries sought to care for the sick and educate our public we have done a horrible job on sexual abuse of minors. That’s right, we have specifically preyed on the young and impressionable. We have ruined lives beyond repair. And yet we stonewall and pontificate. Don’t be smug. It is emblematic of other so called teams in gymnastics, football et al. If you can’t trust your priest, coach, governor or scout troop leader, who can you?

Wall Street is a game of numbers and numbers can’t be altered or can they? Stocks gyrate up and down by 20-50% largely based on rumor. Theranos was a new type of testing that would revolutionize medicine. Millions of dollars invested. Safeway and Walgreens were going to carry the tests. The board included former heads of the DOD, Wells Fargo, Bechtel and of course Mad Dog Mattis..  All taken in by what was probably a total fraud. 

Nikola is an electric truck startup that staged a video showing one of their rigs cruising down the highway. It turns out that they pushed a shell of a truck with no engine to the top of a hill and then filmed the ride down. Some pretty smart people got sucked in and millions down the drain. 

Everyday there are people stealing everything from pension funds to school budgets. There are con men on the prowl worldwide on the internet. The recent revelations of Facebook are just the tip of the iceberg. Are we at the core dishonest?

Money, greed and power will do strange things or are they just part of our way of life? I would hold out that we are shocked at first but then complacent or even complicit in our acceptance of,”It’s just the way it is”.

Trust is earned. I go out on a limb for anyone if I feel they are genuine and truthful. I am also greatly saddened and beyond crestfallen when I find out it not to be so. I am all too far from sainthood but I hope I am decent human being you can depend on. Maybe we are just numb to events and they are easy to ignore. It’s just people being people. Lower your standards, TTG, otherwise you are going to have a heart attack or an ulcer. Sorry, just not there yet.  

Who do you trust? It says on the fiver in my pocket, “In God We Trust” Maybe we ought to think about that? It may be all we have left. I hope not.

As always

Ted The Great

Factoids:

The FTC said there were 2.2 million fraud reports from consumers in the US in 2020. A large portion were online and from overseas. Many sought out the elderly as perfect targets. Sadly it works. 

Healthcare fraud is somewhere between $100-230 BILLION per year. This comes from HMO’s, doctors, pharmaceutical and individuals. The most common is billing for services not provided. 

A recent analysis indicates the average person tells two lies per day. On further study the lies were not evenly distributed. This pattern of a few individuals telling most of the lies follows what is known as the Pareto principle, which is also known as “the law of the vital few.” In short, this principle suggests that in a population, 20 percent of the people account for 80 percent of a behavior. There might be hope

Some Big Lies:

The Trojan Horse

Bernie Madoff

Hitler

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski

Watergate

Stolen Elections