Year End Reflections 2021

Busy year. Kept up on the travel, though domestic and not international. Sprinter, one year after taking possession, has 28 thousand miles on it. In the Sprinter, we've been to the Northwest, the Bay Area, Telluride, and Minnesota and points in between.

Three or four visits to Ivins have allowed TIMDT to keep up on the house project there, started in April 2021. At year end, the house is comfortable with, perhaps, two thirds of furniture installed. Today, New Year's Eve, while I am back in Park City, TIMDT is in Ivins. She hopes to stay there for a couple of weeks working with the handy man to hang paintings etc., establish Freddie relationship with a boarding kennel, buy some indoor plants, etc. etc. TIMDT is doing a fantastic job (I more or less stay out of her way) to turn the Ivins home into a comfortable, pleasant spot for family to gather in a not so cold winter location. I have to pick up a new Jeep Rubican 392 today and hope to get some skiing in considering the abundance of snowfall over the last week and contemplated looking forward.

My own 2021 "extracurricular" life included participation on the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution. We attended the Hoover Fall Retreat in Palo Alto in October. There we met and conversed with Condi Rice, Hoover's new Executive Director. I have participated on the Hoover India working group via Zoom calls. A torrid pace of speakers occurred at our Park City ROMEO group, LSDM. Most recent speakers, Chuck Cobb, Arvida CEO and Disney Board Member, and Harriet Hageman, challenger for Liz Cheney's congressional seat in Wyoming. Both were informative.

I've been catching up on my book reading. The last five books I've read, all read since 01 November 2021, include: "The Devil's Hand," Jack Carr; "East of Eden," John Steinbeck; "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner; "No Man Knows My History," Fawn Brodie; and "Perversion of Justice," Julie K. Brown.

I listen to podcasts when driving or when I can't sleep. Joe Rogan, Commentary, Ben Shapiro, and Steve Bannon get the most airtime... but, others sometimes intervene, including Lex Fridman and Jordan Peterson. Podcasts allow for ideas to be developed and explored, compared to TV news where choreographed soundbites and narrative development crowd out honest, give and take, dialogue.

TIMDT and Mwah (sic) have loved being involved with our grandkids, all five of whom, ages nine to fifteen, live nearby. We go to their concerts and plays and ferry them around as requested by their parents. We're glad that we have our family close and that they seem to be as enthusiastic as we are about using the Ivins home.

I am dismayed at the amount of censorship corporate media and social media engage in to advance their narratives. Take coronavirus. Epidemiologist heavyweights, Bhattacharya, Malone, and McCollough have all been de Twittered or taken off of You Tube for advancing Covid early treatment strategies. Truth cannot be honed in the absence of controversy and it is amazing to me to see large disseminators of information suppress controversy and debate. I think this information suppressing strategy will backfire on the would-be curators of news. Americans, lazy though they be, are beginning to see how media driven narratives are frequently at variance with reality.

The current political environment is troublesome. Inflation, rising indebtedness, porous border, energy production curtailment, supply chain disruption, increased crime, disjointed disease policy, weakening consumer confidence, burgeoning distrust in American institutions, and growing foreign threats, correlate with the arrival of a new president in 2020. The president's mental condition and the ineptitude of his likely replacement, should he have to leave office before the end of his term, are causes for grave concern.

I've held off the skiing since Christmas. Crowds. I'm glad the visitors are coming. But crowded runs with lots of beginners skiing, give me the heebee jeebees. When I hear someone skiing up from behind, I default back to atavistic ski habits... back in the boot, straight legging turns, hesitancy... all actions that increase the risk of incident while skiing. I look forward to getting back on the mountain the first of the year.

I returned to Park City from Ivins on 30 December 2021. It had been my intent to return earlier, but I had a pretty severe sore throat which seemed to persist. I sucked on cough drops for two nights before TIMDT persuaded me I should go to Instacare to check for strep throat. Strep throat is curable by antibiotic, so it seemed a worthwhile thing to do. After testing my swab on 29 December 2021, the doctor told me I didn't have strep throat and probably had one of the two hundred or so viruses that cause winter cold and flu symptoms. I should, he said, go home and gargle some salt water and wait for the irritation to pass. Next day, 30 December 2021, the condition had markedly improved so I drove back to Park City. Four of my grandkids and three of their parents would be, in one guise or another, with TIMDT in Ivins through the 2nd of January of the new year, so TIMDT had a full house in my absence.

I'm ambivalent about 2022. The hidden tax of inflation will further erode America's middle class, a critical cohort, the health of which is essential to ensure a free and democratic future. On the other hand, government overreach on so-called coronavirus remedies has exposed venal efforts by progressives to use coronavirus as a steppingstone to advance central government control over peoples' lives. At heart, Americans are still a freedom loving people and there are indications that many heretofore useful idiot Americans are waking up to the tsunami assault on their freedoms and economic mismanagement of their political leaders. Things can't be all bad if Virginia elects a Republican governor, Texas Rio Grande Hispanic counties turn red, and Joe Rogan signs up for GETTR, right?