It is the day before one that many of us consider a national holiday, and it is a hot sunny good one. There are others who do not consider it so, and are quite shrill about it this year. To me, the blue skies are filled with the roar of WWII rotary engines above the farm and are to me the sound of freedom. Sort of the Anti-fascist noise I appreciate. They are aloft to practice for the fly-over at Culpeper tomorrow, and it is a delight to be on the approach to the regional airport. The croups is part of a club called “The Commemorative Air Force.” They used to have a name associated with the Confederates, but times change, sometimes dramatically. No one here seems to mind.

Forgive me, but the subject this morning is the current nature of truth. Many of my pals gave significant parts of their working lives supporting objective truth, based on provable fact. I know I did. But everything now comes to us with politics baked in at the very beginning. In the Service, we were taught to keep politics out of our assessments to avoid contaminating “truth” with the policies on which it was based. Alas, it is not so anymore. Now ‘truth’ is submerged in agenda. It was best summed up by Mr. Biden, who declared his campaign was based on choosing “Truth over Facts.”

I agree with his assessment, but would prefer truth to be based on facts, and not contained in some pre-determined higher calling. It is all part of a narrative that stipulates our nation has an evil past which must ruthlessly expunged in the interest of a more perfect future.

I am sometimes tempted to react to it all with fervor, but I restrain myself. There is sufficient angst abroad that adding to it would only tinge my last grip on what used to be reality. I know some of the people who are using position to define truth. Dr. Tony Fauci, a physician with whom I served during the SARS-2 outbreak a decade or more ago and who I respect to this day is caught in the trap of fact and truth. He was honest about the strange co-mingling between Public Health- science, if you will- and political truth as he sees it.

Masks? Some wear them and some do not. Governors in our states are applying law to a public health emergency. Remember the story of masks? At first, they were good, then suddenly became bad. Tony admitted that the change was necessary in order to ensure that Hospital personnel would have priority access to a commodity in short supply. Now that manufacturers have geared up to produce a vast supply, masks have become a demonstration of support to a wide variety of restrictive decrees, and bolstered by public shaming.

I know about numbers. Long ago, I was a minion of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. One of my jobs was counting the number of sea-mines distributed by the Iranians in the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. I recall one morning when an earnest young officer came to me with dramatic evidence of an increase in the number of the weapons being deployed against shipping. I sighed. The number that existed that very morning was one that had been announced by the Secretary of Defense and accepted by the White House. Was it 43? Changing the number so rapidly would undermine statements of our seniors, and potentially force policy decisions that could be interpreted as confusion or worse.

I explained to the young officer that what we had to deal with was a DoD-approved number, the truth as we understood it, and we had to wait for a propitious time to alter the count to something we could justify as objective fact.

Since I have been part of that sort of officially sanctioned double booking, I am not surprised it is happening again. But this time, adjustments to official numbers are at least partly political in nature, and what is at stake are not millions of dollars, but trillions involved in the Federal budget. I am not sure we ever mentioned the term “trillions” in my days in Government, but in the fight against the latest plague, the Government uses- and spends taxpayer dollars- in that astonishing numeric regime.

Part of that pursuit of ‘truth’ led to a quite extraordinary set of double books, with the inconvenient set discarded. In order to mobilize public opinion, people who perish in hospital are tested for the COVID-19 virus. Most people so affected are counted as having died “from” the virus, even if their reason to seek care had nothing to do with what we have termed “the plague.”

They actually died “with” the virus, among other factors, even if they actually perished from an eight-minute neck-stomp by a white police officer who may have had a previous personal association with the victim. That is based on reports of shared employment between the cop and Mr. Floyd over eighteen months. That fact does not contribute to the truth and has quietly been dropped from the narrative.

Yes, I think we all agree: the death of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis was horrific and contributing factors must be expunged through public examination of police practice. Abolishing the police, as has been proposed, is absurd. Contributing factors in the incident involving Mr. Floyd included levels of illicit drugs sufficient to cause death. In most circumstances, the presence of antibodies to COVID would make his death directly attributable to them, even with his horrific treatment on the pavement. That is a number which contributes to the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Yesterday, the Government announced that 55,000 new cases were reported. It is a startling and huge number. But the vast majority of them are products of people who have been exposed to the virus, but are not reporting the physical manifestation of the plague. Death rates “from” COVID continue to decline, but that, like Iranian sea-mines in my time, would not be grounds for public policy decisions favored by some of our leaders.

“With” and “From” assume entirely different implications as reported. Many states have delayed or modified their policies on relaxation of restrictions on their populations based on the number of reported COVID cases. It is like my Iranian numbers. There is a number useful for policy, and another number that shows the curve of death continues to decline in the number of people who are hospitalized and actually pass away.

Thus there is good news in the numbers, concealed a bit, but sufficient for some young loons to hold COVID parties to deliberately expose themselves to the plague. Older folks like me already are taking basic scientific facts and complying with the common-sense advice to stay home, and if forced to go out, will wear a mask, or at least have one handy. Others, who science says are less vulnerable to the most drastic consequences of the virus, on the premise that exposure will render them less likely to develop the deadly consequences later.

This is a form of lunacy that science tells me is not only futile but potentially deadly beyond the individual. The admonition from many experts is that exposure will enable further spread of the virus, and is a likely hazard to other citizens. I am inclined to agree, depending on the vulnerability of those exposed. Mothers of the Baby Boomers were known to hold “chicken pox parties” to ensure that their children were exposed to the virus, and recovered with life-time immunity to a disease whose consequences intensified with age.

I imagine we will stumble through this disaster in time. But there are reports of another deadly virus emerging in hog populations in China. Experts tell us that it is not transmitted at present to humans, but that it certainly is possible. Human to human transmission could be inevitable. Since all things are possible in search of truth, please don’t blame me for thinking that the emergence of a new threat in the latter half of this year could result in imposition of the now established means of population control.

Fine and good, if factually based. But if one throws in a Presidential election conducted in the most successful economy on earth, there is certainly a truth in voting remotely to avoid exposure. Mail-in ballots uncontrolled by actual request of registered voters might be construed as a truth that is compelling and supportive of our tradition of voting in our Republic.

The only problem I see with that is inconvenient fact. We will not know who exactly is voting. That is my version of the truth, and it is based on factual reports of voter fraud in places like New Jersey. I guess we will see, won’t we? I would base facts on truth, if I knew what it is.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
http://www.vicsocotra.com