How to be decapitated and not lose your head as the world descends into madness

If we hadn't let things slide for so long when it comes to the meaning of words, no one would have gotten away with saying vaccines are safe and effective or that elections are free and fair

Years ago when I was working as the editor of a weekly newspaper in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley, I read on the police log that a woman in town had her arm “severed” in a car accident. I talked to the police chief or his sergeant and they confirmed that yes, the arm had been severed.

So I was surprised to meet the woman involved in the accident some weeks later and to see that she still had two arms.

One arm was in a cast or sling. But still, it was there.

Had they re-attached it?

I asked her.

No, she’d said. It hadn’t actually come off.

I walked away trying to understand. Severed means that something is completely separated from something else. But here the word severed had been used to mean something like “almost completely separated from the body but not quite.”

Huh.

I can’t remember where, but a few years later I read about someone being decapitated. I thought this was quite clear. His head had been lobbed clean off. This is the obvious meaning. The man had been dispossessed of his “cap” — de-capped.

Then, come to find out, his head hadn’t come completely off at all. He still had it(!) It was on the top of his body. It was just out of whack, or something — I think they called it ‘internal decapitation.’

So I began to see that words were being used to mean something very different from their dictionary definitions — something the exact opposite, in some instances.

I’ve run into this several times with dentists.

I went to a dentist while living on Miami Beach several years ago. I hadn’t been to the dentist in a while so I wasn’t sure what they’d find. But I was still a bit shocked when the dentist told me I had something like 17 cavities.

I’d always had pretty good teeth, and had had only one cavity ever by that point in my life.

I didn’t have the money, so didn’t have the 17 cavities filled. But as you might understand, I was quite distressed about the situation.

About a year later when I had dental insurance and was living in the Midwest, I went to a dentist again, bracing for the worst.

The dentist did a thorough check of my teeth and said, “You don’t have any cavities.”

“What??” I said. “What do you mean?”

No, he confirmed, there are no cavities.

He humored me a bit, telling me that perhaps my teeth had regenerated, and he’d think about writing it up in a medical journal.

Yes, very amusing.

But — were they cavities or weren’t they?

A cavity is a hole. There’s either a hole in the tooth or there isn’t.

A third dentist a few years ago was candid with me as I lay there on the chair, saying: “Dentists make all their money on fillings, not cleanings.”

Aha.

There it is, then. Sometimes they are saying it’s a cavity. But it’s not really a cavity. It’s more like a potential or future site of a possible future cavity. There’s just maybe a bit of shadow there, a little depression. And Mr. or Mrs. Dentist is happy to squirt a little white stuff in there to fill it in for the low price of $200.

So this is understandable. It’s the corruption of money, the dentist stretching the meaning of the word cavity to stretch his bank account a bit.

But where are we now with words and their meanings, now that we’ve let careless and unscrupulous people drain words of their meanings for so long?

For the last two years we’ve had endless assurances that the Covid vaccine is safe and effective.

We now know that it wasn’t a vaccine, that it was not safe and was not effective.

The first crime was the misuse of the word “vaccination.”

The CDC changed the definition of vaccination on its website to allow the agency to lie about what it was telling us to put in our bodies.

Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie

Check out @CDCgov’s evolving definition of “vaccination.” They’ve been busy at the Ministry of Truth:

Words have power, and the CDC knew this.

The words “vaccination” and “vaccine” have a positive connotation.

When people in their 70s and 80s heard the word “vaccine,” they immediately thought of the polio vaccine. My father knew a child crippled by polio when he was young. That vaccine, to his generation, was a miracle. A truly life-saving invention.

So they hijacked this word. This word did not at all accurately describe the mRNA shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which are gene therapies, and not vaccines at all.

We should be outraged, totally outraged at this intentional and wicked misuse of a word to cajole Americans into injecting something into their bodies.

We should be outraged at the abuse of our language to manipulate us.

And in what way was it ever safe or effective when in the Pfizer trials more people died in the group that got the vaccine than in the group that was given the placebo?

How is it possible that it’s effective when the countries with the lowest vaccination rates had the lowest excess death rates in 2021?

The vaccines were not effective at preventing infection, preventing spread or even preventing deaths.

The death rate in the United States went up in 2021, the year the vaccines were introduced.

Not down. Up.

And what did safe mean?

Safe for whom?

Not safe for Haley Link Brinkmeyer, the 28-year-old physical therapist from Evansville, Indiana, who dropped dead on the bathroom floor in January of 2021, less than 48 hours after getting the vaccine at the nursing home where she worked.

Not safe for the many young people hospitalized with myocarditis and told they’ll likely never be able to play sports again.

Not safe for the people who were perfectly healthy before getting the vaccine, but shortly after getting it, died of a pulmonary embolism, or a “widowmaker” heart attack.

For them, “safe” was a lie.

The vaccines were not safe.

Every public health official who promised the vaccines were safe should be called to the carpet on this and asked why they said something that was NOT TRUE.

And on to the elections…

Again, they use two words (hmmm, why two?). In the case of elections, it’s “free and fair.”

They reiterate that elections are “free and fair” when there is no evidence to support such a claim given that the voting machines that are used to tabulate votes are a “black box technology” — that is, no one is allowed inside the box to see the source code, so no one really knows how they operate. It is hidden. The only thing you can do is observe what goes into the box and what comes out.

In Arizona, the input seemed to be quite clear. There were around four times as many Republicans as Democrats voting in-person on Election Day in Maricopa County. But when the Election Day results started rolling in, most batches showed the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, with just 54-58% of the Election Day vote.

There are 100,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Maricopa County, but somehow Kari Lake lost the county to Democrat Katie Hobbs by almost 38,000 votes.

A truly free and fair election would not rely on machines that can malfunction en masse to disenfranchise one side — it wouldn’t rely on machines at all, with digital numbers that can be changed remotely, or by inserting something into a tabulator on site.

It would require paper ballots, that are counted by hand.

But the answer to a lot of what is ailing us, is to insist that words be used to mean what they are commonly understood to mean. No one gets to make up new meanings of words on the fly. Language changes. But naturally, over time. Not from one year to the next to fit political goals.

And we need to constantly ask questions like: Free and fair? What do you mean by that? What evidence do you have to support that? Can you please present that evidence? Where is it?

We must challenge them at every turn. Because we’ve been lied to with language. Words have been twisted. And our trust in both people and systems has evaporated.

***

Watch this superb testimony by Phill Kline, a law professor and the former Kansas attorney general, testifying at the Wisconsin election hearing in December of 2020 on the “deconstruction of truth through the deconstruction of the meaning and definitions of words.”

He’s talking about drop boxes, and chiding a former witness, a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission named Dean Knudson, who testified that he thought drop boxes were legal under Wisconsin law even though the law says absentee ballots must be delivered to the clerk.

[A court subsequently ruled that ballot drop boxes were never legal under Wisconsin law].

Kline’s point: If words don’t have fixed meanings, and can mean whatever we impute them to mean, there is utter lawlessness. There is no rule of law. There is only tyranny.