In the 19th century, dentistry in the U.S. was an unconventional affair, often entrusted to a peculiar breed known as barber surgeons.

These individuals were skilled in wielding a straight-edge razor but also dental care. Their treatments, regrettably, veered towards causing more harm than healing, and their strange advice to patients bordered on the bizarre, including the using the bill of an osprey to pick at the gums.

Despite these unorthodox beginnings, the 1800s saw remarkable advancements in dentistry that laid the foundation for modern dental practices, elevating the field to new heights of professionalism and patient care.

Auguste Taveau introduced a groundbreaking innovation in 1816, the first dental fillings. His amalgam, consisting of silver coins mixed with mercury, provided a viable solution for treating dental decay and restoring teeth. It marked a significant shift from the age-old practices of extracting damaged teeth.

In 1839, Charles Goodyear’s discovery of vulcanized rubber revolutionized the field of denture construction. Before this breakthrough, gold was the primary material used for denture bases, making them prohibitively expensive for ordinary people. With the advent of vulcanized rubber, dentures became more affordable and accessible, dramatically improving the lives of those with missing teeth.

In 1840, Horace Wells demonstrated nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, for sedation during dental treatments. This breakthrough provided patients with much-needed comfort and helped reduce anxiety associated with dental visits. Around the same time, Thomas Morton showcased the use of ether anesthesia for surgical procedures.

In 1866, Lucy Hobbs shattered gender barriers in dentistry by becoming the first female to earn a DDS degree after graduating from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery. Her achievement opened doors for more women to pursue careers in dentistry.

In 1871, James Beal Morrison patented the first mechanized dental drill. Although it was slow and laborious, this invention marked the beginning of more efficient and precise dental drilling techniques, easing the process of cavity preparation and dental restorations.

In the 1870s, the introduction of baked porcelain inlays became a significant advancement in restorative dentistry. Inlays offered a more durable and aesthetically pleasing alternative to traditional fillings, improving patient outcomes further.

In the 1890s, Willoughby Miller described the microbial basis of dental cavities. His research increased awareness about cavity prevention, prompting the introduction of oral health products for home use.

In 1895, Edmund Kells created a machine adapting the X-ray for dentistry. He also introduced a suction apparatus used by dentists and surgeons, hired the first female dental assistant, and was the first to use electricity in his offices.

Finally, in 1896, Washington Wentworth Sheffield invented the toothpaste tube, a seemingly simple but transformative innovation. The toothpaste tube made dental hygiene products more accessible and convenient for everyday use, encouraging better oral care practices.

The milestones of 19th-century dentistry were vital stepping stones that brought the profession from the hands of barber surgeons to the domain of today’s dental practitioners.

When I listen to talk radio, I hear how President Joe Biden is evil because he is doing this or that. All he can do is follow the “script” after being sufficiently medicated to appear less cognitively impaired in public.

The problem is that Biden does not know what he is doing or saying because he has dementia. That is someone else, not him.

And while not defending anything he had done in the past, such as lying, plagiarizing, bullying, and setting up shell companies for him and his family to benefit from selling his influence, the record should reflect that he has no idea he is lying. All of these things happened when he was vice president.

So when he claims Hunter is a good kid or that as vice president, he did nothing wrong or instructed to incorrectly claim easy-to-prove facts like reducing the national deficit, it is because of his dementia. What sort of dementia Biden has is up to a doctor to diagnose, so all anyone else can do is point to how he behaves publicly.

Noticeable actions by Biden include inappropriate social behavior like sniffing girls’ and women’s hair, lack of motor skills, stiff or slow movements, hallucination, social tact, agitation, frustration, anger, and compulsive behavior, including repeated lying, difficulty reading, speaking, and general confusion. And with some forms of dementia, whatever common behaviors in the sufferer’s life before the onset are amplified after the disease takes hold of the mind and body.

So, when someone says he’s a so-and-so for doing such-and-such, they are incorrect because Biden has no control over his actions and is an elder abused puppet standing in for whoever holds the marionette’s strings.

Laying in bed on Saturday morning, I turned on my radio to my favorite classic rock station. As I listened to the music, I slipped into and out of sleep several times.

However, I must have dropped off into REM sleep because I started dreaming about an A-10 Wart Hog firing at an enemy position to my right front. The aircraft has a distinctive sound when the pilot lets the 30mm gun mounted in the nose blaze.

Bbbbbrrrrpppfff…Bbbbbrrrrpppfff…Bbbbbrrrrpppfff.

In my dream, which quickly became a night terror because we were “danger close,” and the bullets ripped through the ground nearest us. The pounding of the weapon becomes a staccato tattoo that leaves a frightening yet exciting impression in the memory.

Suddenly, the aircraft peeled off and flew away, and I woke up to the sound of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. It was certainly anything but “In the Garden of Eden.”

I got up to shower but could not empty my mind of the song or the dream. I finally had to go online and listen to the entire 22-minute gallon of Red Mountain wine-fueled tune out of my head.

And there it was, the drum solo midway through and the bane of my night terror. It sounded enough line an A-10 in a firefight that now, even without sleeping or dreaming, I hear the Warthog at work.

I shared this with a fellow veteran in Virginia City via social media, but I never heard back because perhaps, like me, it was too “danger close” for him.

Many people are upset at being compared to Germans supporting the rise of Nazism when laid out next to COVID and how the military, political, corporate, educational, and media complex, not to mention the individual, dealt with the “unclean,” during the pandemic of 2019.

So, let us recapitulate the history of COVID and its Holocaustic resemblance.

A fifth of the population was labeled as “unclean,” barred from most public spaces, including theatres, restaurants, movies, pubs, clubs, swimming pools, sporting events, concerts, conventions, etc. People had to carry a digital mark so authorities could confirm they weren’t unclean to get into a public place.

They were fired and barred from most jobs: education, healthcare, courts, all public sector work, union jobs, and private employers. Fired, they were denied employment insurance because of being unclean.

They could not travel on trains, planes, and chartered boats. They had no legal means of leaving the country. Even if they wanted to, they could not escape the country that hated them.

It became illegal to socialize with them. They were not allowed to attend weddings or funerals or visit sick relatives or friends in hospital. Special laws were made for them, subjecting them to house arrest if they were around anyone who had recently had a positive PCR test.

They had to continue to cover their faces in public even after “universal masking” ended. And it became socially acceptable to wish death upon them in social media and major news organizations.

Public health figures and other politicians gave press conferences, shaming and insulting those who refused the COVID shot and all its booster. The public developed negative opinions of them and relished calling them names.

News media regularly ran polls asking if they should be arrested or fined. Public figures spoke openly about withholding healthcare. Indeed, some were removed from organ transplant lists, condemning them to death.

There were no end dates for these measures. Instead, it was called the “new normal.” And criticizing data found to be questionable made the person asking a social pariah and likely cost friendships, family relations, and jobs.

The lesson of the Holocaust and COVID isn’t that the Nazis or people of the 21st Century are uniquely gullible or evil, but that most people adopt the dominant group ideology based on fear and give over to wanton irrationality or brutal inhumanity.

As in certain cults or gangs, the brutality or irrationality of the acts or beliefs required to signal group inclusion further entrenches people into the ideology rather than repel them.

So, yes, if you’re a typical person, it is overwhelmingly likely that you would have been a Nazi had you been born in Nazi Germany. And if you cheered for the lockdowns and mandates, forced children to wear masks in class, and pushed an ineffective vaccine and its boosters, you are no better than a natural-born Nazi.

Live with it.

The legacy media is attempting to create a false narrative ahead of the 2024 elections. The media portrays racism as solely being on the right side of the political spectrum, suggesting that whites are against minorities and that the country should resist them.

Media intends to create fear and division by using race to distract from more pressing concerns, and while some hold racist beliefs, they are a small minority. Most people do not wake up with a desire to harm others based on their race and instead wish only to provide for their families, pay their bills, care for themselves, and contribute to society.

The proof comes as the legacy media calls a Mexican cartel member a “white supremacist” but cannot be bothered to report two stories about black men executing white men, shooting them in the head. It doesn’t fit their narrative or the Communist agenda overtaking the nation.

“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” Hebrews 10:25 (KJV)

A member of the church, who previously had been attending services regularly, stopped going. After a few weeks, the pastor decided to visit him.

It was a chilly evening. The pastor found the man at home alone, sitting before a blazing fire. Guessing the reason for his pastor’s visit, the man welcomed him, led him to a comfortable chair near the fireplace, and waited.

The pastor made himself at home but said nothing. In the silence, he contemplated the dance of the flames around the burning logs.

After some minutes, the pastor took the fire tongs, carefully picked up a burning ember, and placed it on the hearth, then he sat back in his chair, still silent.

The host watched all this in quiet contemplation. As the one lone ember’s flame flickered and diminished, there was a momentary glow, and then its fire was no more. Soon it was cold and dead.

The pastor glanced at his watch and realized it was time to leave.

He slowly stood up, picked up the cold, dead ember, and placed it back in the middle of the fire. Immediately it began to glow like the coals around it.

As the pastor reached for the doorknob, his host said, “Thank you so much for your visit and especially for the fiery sermon. I’ll see you in church next Sunday.”

Working on my truck has never been fun for me. What should take 20 minutes to do ended up being over an hour, and that was to change the battery.

With me was my little partner, my six-gallon wet/dry shop vac. It was having problems; unplugging from the wall and plugging up its hose, so we had to have a little sit-down.

“You know acting like this won’t get you in the movies,” I said.

I could see his frustration as I stretched out his hose.

“What do you think he’d say if he saw you being this way?” I asked.

Again a heave came from his hose.

“No, he would be serious until some comedic relief was needed,” I explained.

Another whisper of air found its way from his hose as I removed what was clogging his throat.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Think like a hero, like R2-D2, so we can get this job done, okay?”

Finally, with a belch, his hose cleared, and we returned to changing the battery.

Wrapping up his cord, placing his hose in its carrier, and rolling him to where I keep him, I smiled, “May the fourth be with.”

The little guy became so excited that he sprayed liquid from his wet/dry canister across the garage floor. You will never see a happier shop vac than mine.

T-65B X-wing Starfighter was easy to fly. Much of it depends on your thoughts and a bit of hand-eye coordination.

Having only taken aeronautics in my Freshman year of high school and failing miserably because of a lack of math skills, I never dreamed that one day I would have the opportunity to strap my backside into an advanced aircraft, taking it for a spin. Don’t get me wrong, when asked if I wanted to fly one, I jumped at the chance, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous.

Thankfully, I got some hands-on practice using a simulator. The taking off is the second painless part of the program, what the sim-flights are called, with the actual aerial work being effortless.

Landing, on the other hand, especially since we would be landing on an aircraft carrier, was the hard part. I cannot begin to number the times I crashed into the fantail, overshot the ball, or guide lights, bounced off the deck, missed the wire, jumped the net, or dropped into the ocean.

After nearly 40 hours of working with the program, I finally got the hang of landing on a “floating postage stamp.” The trick I learned was not to overthink the process, and with the automated systems aboard T-65B X-wing Starfighter, to allow it to do the “heavy lifting.”

Pushing my helmet back into the seat’s headrest, I waited for the signal to take my feet off the brake. Yes, my feet, not my foot, because the Starfighter is that powerful.

Receiving a salute followed by the wave, I shot down the short runway and blasted into the sky. I joined a pilot already in the air, and we were soon followed by a third and fourth.

There is a video of us doing a fly-by on the carrier, but I have yet to find it.

We were air bound for 20 minutes before it was time to return to the deck. Sadly, I missed my first approach because I overshot the ball and had to wait for the two fliers behind me to land.

I overthought the process, and rather than concentrating on guiding the craft to the deck, I allowed myself to get caught up in the moment and the distraction of headphone chatter.

On my second time around, I slid in like warm butter. Then catastrophe, my forward gear rotated counterclockwise and threw me and the aircraft starboard, leaving me hanging off the side of the deck.

Flight crews rushed in, some risking their lives doing their job, to pull me from the wounded fighter and haul me to the deck. Then these crews set about recovering the aircraft, preventing a multi-million dollar loss.

It was truly a dream to have “test flown” the T-65B X-wing Starfighter.

In April 2020, Washoe County’s website announced the county was part of a nationwide program called Built For Zero. In January 2021, Special Projects Manager Dana Searcy and Washoe County published a comprehensive Built For Zero report outlining the number of available beds in Washoe County used to identify gaps in the community.

“We want to be clear about what is included in our data and what is not: The HUD Housing Inventory Count performed annually by the CoC (Continuum of Care-HUD Funded) [are] different from this, but there is some overlap between the two,” the report reads. “Additionally, we did not include programs that fall into the next step of transitioning out of homelessness, including affordable and subsidized housing.”

Shortly after President Joe Biden signed the legislation on Thu., Mar. 11, 2021, Washoe County received $91,587,038 in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) for projects and programs supporting the ongoing COVID-19 impacts and recovery efforts. Simultaneously, The City of Reno was awarded $51.5 million from the SLFRF through the ARPA.

Then the Reno City Council contracted to buy Governor’s Bowl on East 7th Street near the Spaghetti Bowl and turn it into a permanent emergency homeless shelter. According to the City of Reno documents, the price tag for the Bowl was $2.2 million. The county took the reins because Reno needed approval from the county for funding, creating an inefficient process.

On Tue., Feb. 2, 2021, Searcy said 76 percent of 1,436 were in a housing program or emergency center, and the remaining number, about 340, are verified or assumed to be without a shelter.

The Nevada CARES Campus opened on Mon., May 17, 2021, featuring a tent–with no heat or air conditioning and 604 Beds. The county claimed an 88 percent occupancy rate for the first year. In July 2021, responsibility for all homeless services, including finances, was transferred to Washoe County.

In June 2022, it became public that the tent in the encampment did not protect people from Covid-19, instead adding to the health risks. Further, black mold was growing in the shower areas, and the water pipes had frozen over the winter and left unrepaired.

Brown and Searcy contracted with a Canadian-based company OrgCode Consulting to provide Washoe County with research on how the region was doing and how it could do better in July 2022.

The county website shows that as of April 2023, Searcy remains stuck on Phase Two of Five Phases: counting the homeless population so proper funding and resources can be established.

Also, in April 2023, spending concerns became apparent about the three-year lease at 170 South Virginia Street, for $643,679.05 for offices for the Cares Campus team, and the approval of $225,170.73 for office furniture for the team for the three-year lease. Despite this, Washoe Commissioners moved forward with 35 new partnerships, now running through millions of dollars for less than 800 people on the payrolls.

Meanwhile, Washoe County has 735 beds available for homelessness, and commissioners recently voted to increase the funding from $38 million to $70 million.

As I woke up this morning, I decided to talk with God. I told him that I was tired of being angry.

While getting dressed, a question popped into my mind: “Why are you angry?” Without hesitation, I answered: “Of being wrong when I know I’m right.”

Those words resonated with me after the situation I found myself in once again on Friday. Every April and August, it seems the Virginia City fathers surrender the town to groups of people who neither act as tourists nor guests.

August it is Hot August Nights, with classic cars parked in such a way the day before the actual event that I and others making deliveries cannot do our jobs. On Friday, it was the Virginia City Grand Prix and one of Storey County’s Sheriff Deputys.

As I dropped down Sutton Street with the intent to turn right onto E Street and make my way up the hill to St. Mary’s in the Mountain Catholic Church, I had a man wearing a yellow reflective vest try to stop me. He claimed the roadway was close to anyone not associated with the Prix.

“On what authority?” I asked.

“Mine,” he said.

“Well too hell with that since I don’t see a badge on you!” I returned as I moved forward around the corner.

He stepped in front of my truck, and I pressed down on the gas pedal while holding down the clutch. The engine revved a little, and as I lifted my foot off the clutch, the truck drove forward a few inches to a foot.

“Let the asshole go!” he called to those gathering around him.

After delivering my papers, I headed up the hill to C Street, towards Mill Street, and onto E Street from the opposite end. As I approached the Silverland Inn’s driveway, a woman in a reflective yellow vest stepped in front of my truck to stop me from entering the business’s private property and delivering my newspapers.

Slowing enough for her to move out of my way, I did not stop. Just as I pulled in front of the motel doors, a sheriff’s vehicle rolled up behind me.

His first words were, “Did you threaten to run a man over earlier?”

“No.” I said flatly.

“The man and a bunch of others said you did.”

“Anyone swearing out a complaint?”

“No, I get the frustration, but you could be a little nicer. They are guests here, after all.”

“Guest don’t act that way in my house. And if they do, they are shown the door.”

“How long have you been delivering papers up here?”

“About three years.”

“I’ve been putting up with it for 36 years.”

“I didn’t know they started deputies while they are still suckling at their mama’s tit.”

He turned red in the face from either anger or embarrassment, but both for getting caught in a stupid statement akin to a lie.

“Well they have a permit for this event…” he started.

“But not to block two-way roads from being used until tomorrow,” I interrupted.

“Yes, they do,” he said.

“I’ll bet you that their permit does not say that,” I said. “I’ll go so far as to say they don’t have the authority to block driveways to businesses either. That is a job for law enforcement, which is why you’re not out there working that street.”

“I can see there’s no talking to you,” he said as he started for his cruiser.

I wanted to be a smartass in the worst way, saying, “No, it’s not that you can’t talk to me, it’s you can’t argue something you know is wrong.” I kept my mouth shut.

After delivering to the motel, I returned to E Street and crossed over Mill Street, getting back on route. When I got to the Storey County Courthouse, where I deliver papers to the County Recorders’ office, I asked to see a copy of the event permit for the Grand Prix. And exactly as I thought, nowhere on the sheet of paper does it say a civilian can block another civilian from moving freely through the streets, nor does it say a civilian can stop another civilian from going into a business driveway or parking lot.

I can add further credence to my point as the sheriff’s office cited a race participant for trespassing on private property and had to force the organizers to create a pathway for pedestrians.

Come August, if I cannot use C Street or any other street in Virginia City for my job, the businesses I can’t get to won’t get papers. Like I said at the start, I’m tired of being angry and tired of being right and treated as if I’m wrong.