March 2020 is a time I will never forget. I went to a store for food and people were lined up, all masked up and gloved. I put a paper mask on but had no gloves. Down one aisle I went, started sweating profusely. Second aisle, heart racing and nausea set in. Third aisle, room started spinning. Cut my visit short, hit the register feeling like I was going to faint and the clerk asked if I was OK. I told her no, I can't do this and she said take it off and I did and never put it back on.
I went home and called my doctor who immediately penned a letter of exemption for me. Then I started reading. Every word printed on Covid. Like Hollywood that always tips their hand, 1st hand news of an event usually is, by and large, truthful. They need some time to fine tune their message that they didn't do during an actual reporting event, change it and assume that people aren't keeping track or are too traumatized to remember what was initially said.
So, I'm guilty. I fell in line for 1/2 hour. At no place anywhere for the next year did I encounter a face that could be recognized. I live in a large city, 1/4 million people, never shut down, never distanced myself, went everywhere. When I put that in context I am stunned, was I all alone here?
What happened that year was hell for me. Yelling and screaming in my face, Stassi police following me, cops called to remove me, CVS refusing to serve me, it was a weekly onslaught. I got the law down pat, the Constitution, what my rights were and how they were breaking the law. It got to the point I could quote chapter and verse so the battles got less and lesser. BTW, I never once showed my medical exemption
Yeah, I was so very disappointed in people but I also understand it on many levels. Glad that there are people who still are talking about what a terrible effect all these policies have.
This. "I think my favorite though was when one writer published an article in The Atlantic about how Germany was beating COVID with N95 masks and vaccine passports, and how the U.S. could be doing so much better if we just followed Germany’s example…and then cases and hospitalizations and every other COVID metric in Germany absolutely exploded just a few weeks later. I mean, you couldn’t have written it any better."
Like many people who are genuinely interested in the truth, I came across the German example when I was trying to convince myself, one way or the other, about masks. There was a paper (probably more than one) published about the success of masks in Germany: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015954117. The abstract of the paper states, “We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of COVID-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when wearing of face masks became mandatory in public transport and shops. Depending on the region we consider, we find that face masks reduced the number of newly registered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infections between 15% and 75% over a period of 20 days after their mandatory introduction. Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, we conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 47%.”
Note the use of "20 days after their mandatory introduction" language. What about later on? Glad you asked! The cumulative confirmed cases graph does bend down during the study period, reported by the study authors to be somewhere between March 30 and April 30, but the identical dataset illustrates a strikingly different outcome soon thereafter—almost as if the authors only selected the data range that supported their desired conclusion. As Ian notes, the results went exactly against their conclusions in short order. As you will also note, the study paper is still published. It has been "updated" but not corrected. #LatherRinseRepeat
The one thing missing here is the fact that there was no pandemic, the fact that this was planned long ago, and the fact that the DOD ran the show with the help of the IC-directed media. Anyone, including Ian, who still believes there are scary viruses and pandemics will likely fall for the next one.
In your item 14, you wrote: "Another lesson I learned was an unfortunate one; most people will comply with whatever they’re told, no matter how absurd or disconnected from the evidence." A while ago I read something attributed to Voltaire: "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities". You could do worse than make that the title of your next book. I can still become incandescent with rage when I think of the things that we were subjected to by ghoulish bureaucrats, all reinforced by virtue-signalling community members.
March 2020 is a time I will never forget. I went to a store for food and people were lined up, all masked up and gloved. I put a paper mask on but had no gloves. Down one aisle I went, started sweating profusely. Second aisle, heart racing and nausea set in. Third aisle, room started spinning. Cut my visit short, hit the register feeling like I was going to faint and the clerk asked if I was OK. I told her no, I can't do this and she said take it off and I did and never put it back on.
I went home and called my doctor who immediately penned a letter of exemption for me. Then I started reading. Every word printed on Covid. Like Hollywood that always tips their hand, 1st hand news of an event usually is, by and large, truthful. They need some time to fine tune their message that they didn't do during an actual reporting event, change it and assume that people aren't keeping track or are too traumatized to remember what was initially said.
So, I'm guilty. I fell in line for 1/2 hour. At no place anywhere for the next year did I encounter a face that could be recognized. I live in a large city, 1/4 million people, never shut down, never distanced myself, went everywhere. When I put that in context I am stunned, was I all alone here?
What happened that year was hell for me. Yelling and screaming in my face, Stassi police following me, cops called to remove me, CVS refusing to serve me, it was a weekly onslaught. I got the law down pat, the Constitution, what my rights were and how they were breaking the law. It got to the point I could quote chapter and verse so the battles got less and lesser. BTW, I never once showed my medical exemption
Masks make total sense if they are not seen as a medical intervention but a symbol of totalitarism. They are the Swastika to the Health Nazis.
Yeah, I was so very disappointed in people but I also understand it on many levels. Glad that there are people who still are talking about what a terrible effect all these policies have.
This. "I think my favorite though was when one writer published an article in The Atlantic about how Germany was beating COVID with N95 masks and vaccine passports, and how the U.S. could be doing so much better if we just followed Germany’s example…and then cases and hospitalizations and every other COVID metric in Germany absolutely exploded just a few weeks later. I mean, you couldn’t have written it any better."
Like many people who are genuinely interested in the truth, I came across the German example when I was trying to convince myself, one way or the other, about masks. There was a paper (probably more than one) published about the success of masks in Germany: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015954117. The abstract of the paper states, “We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of COVID-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when wearing of face masks became mandatory in public transport and shops. Depending on the region we consider, we find that face masks reduced the number of newly registered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infections between 15% and 75% over a period of 20 days after their mandatory introduction. Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, we conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 47%.”
Note the use of "20 days after their mandatory introduction" language. What about later on? Glad you asked! The cumulative confirmed cases graph does bend down during the study period, reported by the study authors to be somewhere between March 30 and April 30, but the identical dataset illustrates a strikingly different outcome soon thereafter—almost as if the authors only selected the data range that supported their desired conclusion. As Ian notes, the results went exactly against their conclusions in short order. As you will also note, the study paper is still published. It has been "updated" but not corrected. #LatherRinseRepeat
The one thing missing here is the fact that there was no pandemic, the fact that this was planned long ago, and the fact that the DOD ran the show with the help of the IC-directed media. Anyone, including Ian, who still believes there are scary viruses and pandemics will likely fall for the next one.
In your item 14, you wrote: "Another lesson I learned was an unfortunate one; most people will comply with whatever they’re told, no matter how absurd or disconnected from the evidence." A while ago I read something attributed to Voltaire: "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities". You could do worse than make that the title of your next book. I can still become incandescent with rage when I think of the things that we were subjected to by ghoulish bureaucrats, all reinforced by virtue-signalling community members.