Traveling While We Still Can
Lexington, KY
November 21, 2022
Last month, I participated in a charity golf event. The day before, for the first time in weeks, it rained in north Georgia. Showers continued thru the night, stopping just as we were supposed to play.
Unfortunately, the soggy conditions caused the Club to prohibit carts from leaving their path. This is common when a course is wet, and most players try to abide.
But as with any traffic law, on occasion convenience trumps compliance, and we bend rules that are easy to break. I did so right away, albeit by accident.
From our first tee, the cart paths forked up either side of the fairway. As when selecting grocery lines, highway lanes, or concession queues, I inevitably chose the wrong one. Like a Joe Biden sentence, it ended without warning, and we rolled aimlessly onto the grass.
Having unexpectedly left the concrete, I tried to turn around and return to the pavement. But the cart slowed to a crawl, and tried to stop. Before it did, it came back into contact with the truncated path, and began to pick up speed.
Instead of wondering whether our cart was broken, I was mortified when I realized it was working as intended. It knew where I was and wouldn’t let me go. Having left the prescribed path, it wouldn’t move unless I returned.
This seems innocent enough. After all, the cart was merely doing its job by enforcing the rules. If I didn’t want trouble, all I had to do is follow them. But in what other ways is technology being designed to “just follow orders” to ensure we do too?
Those of us who’ve worried about electronic crack-downs and universal surveillance are always told we’re being paranoid, or that this digital dystopia will forever remain a distant dream of a disappointed elite.
Yet over the last few years, their dream is becoming our nightmare. Unfortunately, most of us refuse to wake up, despite alarms ringing around the world.
In the Kafka novel where we’re consigned to live, the pages are turning quickly. Just last week, two of them flipped fast, almost as if they were stuck together so no one could read them.
One was typed in Bali, where the cartel of anointed elites who rule the world gathered together to plan our lives. There the G20 leadership continued its quest to strip the middle class of the means to sustain itself. And they’re relying on health hysterics, climate cultists, and other useful idiot ideologues to act as their propaganda mills and enforcement arms.
The people who caused incalculable calamity with lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements now recommend universal “health passports” to “facilitate” international travel. Medication will be mandated and monitored, and anyone wishing to go anywhere must consume whatever the unaccountable World Health Organization prescribes for mankind.
These “shared technical standards and verification methods” will be digital. Over (no doubt a very short) time they’ll be confined neither to a single disease, nor merely to health.
There’s also no reason they’ll be limited to cross-border travel. During the covid insanity, several US states and agents of the “public health” police suggested prohibiting intrastate or air travel to anyone who declined to take the government’s drug. A digital tracker…whether on a phone, bracelet, or under the skin…makes this easy.
The Chinese “social credit score” provides a premonition. Opinions, actions, or purchases “world leaders“ deem unacceptable or inappropriate could cause individual mobility or other “privileges” of citizenship to be arbitrarily revoked. But how?
That’s on the second sheet printed last week. It was penned in New York, where several institutions agreed to test the long-anticipated central bank digital currency (CBDC). This is the electronic leash by which our enlighten masters confine us to our kennel and ration our kibble.
Our current cash, flawed and phony as it is, at least offers a semblance of privacy. Because of that, it will be taken from us. Since 90% of it has disintegrated since it was introduced in 1971, most of it already has been.
But now a new “digital currency” will be formed and enforced. It will be touted as more convenient and streamlined, which will probably be true. Maybe we can finally dispense with the IRS. Not because we don’t want it, but because they won’t need it.
The new CBDC will allow its issuers to monitor, record, or prevent any transactions we try to make. “Taxes” can be taken directly from our accounts, or deposits prevented from going in. All at the click of a mouse. To prevent “illicit” transactions, physical cash will be permanently recalled.
Purchases can be prohibited for whatever reason authorities decide. They could be declined if we’ve already driven our quota of miles, eaten our allotment of meat, expressed an unapproved thought, or contradicted an official decree.
The same people unleashing this are the ones who gave us the horrific pandemic response. But they’ll tell us to trust them, and not to worry. Just do what they say, and everything will be fine.
What they’ll say we should worry about instead is the weather, which they insist is broken. They accuse us of breaking it, but promise to fix it once they’ve accumulated sufficient power. And they’ll do so be depriving us of ours, particularly the energy that makes modern life possible.
Taxes, sanctions, and restrictions will continue curtailing access to the oil, gas, coal, and fusion that prevent billions from freezing and starving. The conditions to which this would consign most of mankind isn’t merely Medieval; it’s neolithic.
But why would our global elites do so many things that seem intentionally designed to destroy the middle class? Is it that poor primitive men are more easily manipulated than middle class modern ones?
Or maybe we give our elites too much credit. Perhaps, like a wolf attacks a sheep, they loot us not because they’re evil, but because it’s in their nature. They can’t help themselves. It’s what they do.
The question then becomes, what do we do? We don’t know. But this weekend we’re traveling, while fuel remains and we’re still allowed to go anywhere.
Our younger son and a few classmates wanted to visit another friend at the University of Kentucky. They’d spend a few days exploring Lexington, seeing the campus, and watching the Kentucky football team get walloped.
We were fine with them making the visit, but not with them taking the trip. Five seventeen year-olds driving six hours in the dark and over mountains on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year didn’t seem wise.
But our son pleaded. They’d be careful, he said. They’d keep the music off, go the speed limit, and not text while driving. They’d use turn signals and come to complete stops. However sure we were of those predictable promises, we doubted all the mindless drivers who couldn’t care less.
Besides, we were in charge. Our kids can make their case. But we run the show. So we did what any stern parent who knows what’s best would decide to do. We put our foot down. Enough coddling. Kids today have it far too easy. What we say goes. And what we said was this:
We’ll drive you.
I rented a van to accommodate the kids. Friday afternoon, they piled in, and we left Atlanta. Six hours later, we dropped them at the dorm, and told them we’d see them there in a couple days for drive home. Then my wife and I checked into a hotel.
We spent Saturday afternoon in Frankfort. On the return, we weaved thru a quilt of gorgeous horse farms on the road to Lexington. When we arrived, we spent an hour before dinner at Third Street Coffee, a cool place despite looking like a factory where Willie Wonka might fabricate left wing clichés.
After being warmed by lattes, we enjoyed a delightful dinner at Lockbox, on the ground floor of the handsome and historic First National Bank and Trust Building.
Lexington is loaded with quirky coffee shops, funky cafés, and elegant architecture. An eclectic mix of college town, good food, artistic style, and Southern charm, it’s small enough to know, yet large enough to surprise. Our only regret was that in a city that rewards walking, brisk weather made walking impractical.
But today we drive. We’ll retrieve our five passengers from their dorm, and roll south thru the bluegrass. Assuming our car will still let us go.
JD
