The Worst Part of a Vacation

(Photo credit: Brett Breen)

Atlanta, GA

July 29, 2021

One of the blessings of vacation is that we can avoid the news. We close our ears, avert our eyes, and open our minds. 

Among the detriments of going away is that we eventually come back. That’s what we did last week. 

Big mistake. 

Hard as it is to believe, things are getting worse. It’s as if western civilization has undergone a collective lobotomy. 

I’ve recognized and commented on this repeatedly since last year. But even as ridiculous rules seemed to relax and some freedoms were reluctantly restored, we received a new scare tactic. 

We’re all now supposed to continue disrupting our lives to avert the “Delta variant”, as if more contagious (yet less severe, which is one reason they’re more contagious) versions of viruses aren’t part of a predictable, normal process of viral dissipation or natural immunity.

New strains of the flu and common cold emerge all the time. Yet, for all the fabricated fear, as of this week US Covid mortality is as low as it’s been since the “pandemic” began.

But those who have spent a year usurping and abusing power are loathe to give it up. Unfortunately, many of their subservient subjects seem more than willing to let them keep it. And both these groups revile the remnant who would rather not be bossed around by either of them. So we continue walking on eggshells, and thru a circus of hysteria.

The first thing we noticed upon leaving Walla Walla is that a caste system is taking shape. Those with the novel notion that medical procedures are personal…or that health decisions others make might not necessarily be right for themselves…are being portrayed as selfish outcasts who are “unclean”, and unworthy of association. 

Using lies, distortion, and misleading anecdotes, the purveyors of “The Science” are hell-bent on turning those who don’t roll up their sleeves, bend the knee, and do what their told into veritable untouchables…pariahs beyond the pale. 

But Covid cases are rising most quickly in countries…like Israel, England, and the US…where mask and vaccination rates are highest. In the UK, as if on mocking cue, skyrocketing case rates retreated as soon as mask mandates were lifted…just as they spiked after they were implemented.

And in Sweden, which has been open and unmasked throughout this ordeal, and where vaccination rates (only 37%) are among the lowest in Europe, there’s not been a single Covid death in two weeks. Meanwhile, after National Geographic lectured us this Spring that Thailand had deployed effective policy to contain Covid, cases soared as “policy” stagnated.

These are but a few of the counterintuitive examples that have multiplied around the world. Perhaps this story is more complicated…and less of a comic book or morality play…than we’ve been led to believe.

In a saner age, those most susceptible to danger would simply take steps to minimize their own risk. They’d not demand we overhaul society, or that other people disrupt their lives to alleviate their own fears. It would’ve been considered “selfish” (and absurd) to do so. 

For many years, I flew every week, often sitting on a plane next to someone hacking, sneezing, or wheezing. I might’ve preferred he stay home. He probably would’ve too. After all, he felt worse than I did. 

But I know I take certain risks whenever I leave the house (or if stay in it). That’s life. To demand (and require proof!) that everyone else cover his face or put something in his body as prerequisite to participate in normal activities isn’t selfless. It’s egomaniacal, tyrannical, and deranged.

If someone is terrified he might get sick, he should stay home. It’s not his place to insist anyone else do so. If someone is afraid of something, it’s incumbent on that person to take precaution, not to demand someone else do so on his behalf. 

Two years ago, this would’ve been obvious, and gone without saying. That it’s now controversial reveals the depths of incoherence and delusion to which society has sunk.

We’ve lost our minds. Science has been corrupted, from a noble quest for truth to a corrupt handmaiden of power. Viruses have always been with us. Common sense no longer is. 

Vaccines have been available for months. Anyone who wants one can get one. Those who don’t are apparently as comfortable with the risks from Covid as those who do are with risks from the shots…just as with the flu every winter prior to the lunacy of the last year. 

Of course, if vaccines are so effective, why would those who receive them care if anyone else does? And if the efficacy of one person’s vaccine is contingent on another person taking it, then that’s the first person’s problem, not the second’s. No one is obligated to alleviate a stranger’s anxiety, or to accommodate whatever health concerns he might have.

Then there’s the righteous sanctimony and moral superiority. Vaccination…notwithstanding the preening of many advocates…is a serum, not a sacrament. It’s a choice, based on individual circumstance or family situation. It’s not a holy obligation requiring penance from those who refuse it.

In a world of personal responsibility, frightened people wouldn’t call others “selfish” because they won’t inject an unwanted substance to ease another person’s fears. 

The selfish would be those demanding that individuals they’ve never met take treatments and make personal health decisions to mitigate their own discomfort. They’d be those who subject people with differing health requirements to stigma, or consign them to live like lepers for not adopting the medical practices other people prefer.

Among other lies, we were told the “vaccines” were the ticket out of this insanity. Actually, we were promised we’d never enter the asylum. But here we are, a whole planet wrapped in a straitjacket and strapped to the bed. 

This was supposed to be “15 days to slow the spread”. The idea wasn’t to eliminate the virus, but to preserve hospital capacity, which was never in jeopardy. No one should’ve accepted that rationale, or assumed it would end there.

And it didn’t. The con continued, and continues. For eighteen months, we’ve been subjected to lockdowns, masks, economic destruction, travel restrictions, and vaccine propaganda from the political sociopaths and moral reprobates infesting the government health cabal.

The character and credentials of those insisting everyone take a shot isn’t exactly exemplary. The “public health“ establishment has proven itself to be incompetent and corrupt, if not criminal. And when almost every politician, large corporation, major media outlet, and Hollywood celebrity tells us to do something, we should all unhitch the safety lock on our revolver. 

These aren’t the type people from whom we’d normally take medical advice, particularly when they’ve been embarrassingly wrong in every way since the beginning of this fiasco. That they’re all still parroting the same carefully choreographed propaganda should raise skeptical eyebrows.

The sad experience of the last eighteen months implies that not enough will go up. Unfortunately most people have proven they will comply, regardless the overwhelming data contradicting the endless string of ludicrous directives. 

The screws will tighten as we move toward the Fall. We’ve known all along that children are essentially invulnerable to this virus. Yet schools are again threatening to mask them despite there being no benefit (and considerable harm) to the kids, and ample opportunity for all adults to have been vaccinated. The CDC’s own data shows that young people are far more vulnerable to flu (which we somehow always managed to live with) than Covid.

And children are at more risk from the vaccine than from the virus, so protecting them is no justification for medical authoritarianism. Forcing kids to receive vaccines or wear masks isn’t just useless. It’s vindictive and cruel. Most of us used to assume that adults should sacrifice for kids, not the other way around.

The FDA will eventually approve the “vaccines”, which is fine. Except the approval will precipitate a proliferation of mandates. More corporations and venues will require employees and customers to receive shots, and the workers will need to decide whether to comply, quit, follow ridiculous testing protocol, or cover their face.

This, let’s recall, is in the United States, where such a violation of individual rights would recently have been inconceivable. And the “private company” argument doesn’t wash. Most of the offending entities are in bed with the government, and wouldn’t issue such appalling directives without the implicit imprimatur of the state.

Despite ample evidence that masks are meaningless, they remain the last things to go…and the first to return…when the health high priests decide the rubes aren’t behaving themselves. 

Wearing a mask to inhibit a virus is, as Martin Kulldorff of Harvard put it, like closing three of five submarine doors to keep the water out. They’re as useful preventing a virus as a chain link fence is at stopping mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, in the US, our health “experts” tell us we must get vaccinated to be “safe”…but that even those who are vaccinated may need to wear a mask because they’re not “safe”. Why is anyone still listening to these people? 

Then, of course, there’s the explicit cronyism. How is it so few people notice the overt conflicts of interest among those propagating this dictatorial nonsense? Maybe, with the unrelenting push for invasive vaccine mandates and intrusive health tracking, the blatant wealth transfers to Big Pharma and Big Tech are so transparent that no one can see it.

As usual “The Science” can’t get its story straight. It lectures us that unvaccinated people are spreading the virus despite abundant state-level data delivering a much more mixed message.

Often, they use anecdotal hospital tales that are outright lies. The New York Times last week ran a story by Patricia Mazzei about a hospital overrun with healthy Covid patients in their twenties.

When the hospital was called to confirm this story, they said it was almost right. It was off by only one word. As it happened, most of the Covid patients were not healthy people in their twenties. This type “reporting” has been all-too common since the beginning of this calamity, and was instrumental in causing it.

Compounding recent confusion, the CDC…Romper Room of “The Science”…raised its advisory to the highest level for travel to Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth.

This discredited agency wants us to emulate Israel’s vaccination distribution, while claiming the place is too dangerous for us to go there. Maybe they should also start restricting travel to, and requiring masks within, the most vaccinated parts of the US:

We’re told repeatedly and condescendingly by the type people who deny there are only two sexes that “science is real”. And it is. But what we’ve endured isn’t science. It’s superstition. It’s not observation, experimentation, and revision. It’s rabbit’s feet, entrails, and rain dances.

Real science tells us that 40% of Covid deaths are in nursing homes, and that more than half of those hospitalized for coronavirus came in for another reason, and tested positive after admission. It also repeatedly reminds us that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are fat, diabetic people with multiple co-morbidities.

For the vast majority of the population, Covid is no more a threat than the flu. And for many…particularly those that are healthy, under 60, and full of Vitamin D…it’s much less.

Legitimate science informs us that masks are useless, and may even be contributory factors disseminating bugs. These disgusting fabrics allow tiny airborne Covid to flow thru, yet capture larger tactile germs the way a picnic blanket attracts ants.

The science of vaccines affirms that those who take them can still contract and spread the illness…just as they can other viral ailments we’ve somehow managed to endure our entire lives.

My 89 year-old “step-father”…who I’ve always considered to be my father, and perhaps the greatest man I’ve ever known…was vaccinated in January, and tested positive for Covid this week. He feels, as my mother put it, “like he was hit by a very large truck.”

Despite the vaccine, he got sick. It happens, even to those who take their medicine, just as with the flu each winter. Nobody is “at fault” or did anything wrong. It’s a virus. That’s what it does. It spares some, infects others, and affects the afflicted to different degrees.

I think Jerry was right to take the vaccine. He’s pushing ninety and has underlying health issues. And his vaccine may very well have kept his Covid symptoms from being worse. Data confirms that’s true in most cases.

But not necessarily in all of them. There are plenty of unvaccinated people who’ve had Covid, yet felt fine aside from a few sniffles and some fatigue. And there’ve been vaccinated people of comparable age and condition who’ve been laid low. We just don’t know. Everybody’s different, and shouldn’t be treated the same.

Yet we have the incorrigible Governor of California, irresponsibly comparing the unvaccinated to drunk drivers, without acknowledging that the vaccinated are also liable to swerve into someone else’s lane. The finger-pointing with this disease is unlike that of any other modern illness, with the possible exception of (tho’ less rationale than) AIDS several decades ago.

When an unvaccinated person gets Covid, it’s somehow his “fault”, and elicits unsubtle schadenfreude from his immunological superiors. But when a vaccinated person gets sick, we look elsewhere for blame. We instinctively seek the person who turned himself into a weapon by not taking a shot.

Unlike with similar ailments, with Covid we can’t just have sympathy for the sick, and wish him well. We must make a moral judgment, or exact retribution.

This is clearly not about “science”. There’s never been any science behind the demented, despotic, and dystopian measures imposed on us throughout this madness.

This virus is not affected by “policy”. Mitigation measures have been proven not to matter. Covid doesn’t spread any more or less because people don’t get with the program, or do as their told.

We need to grow up, resume our lives without restrictions, and understand that this situation isn’t as simple or cartoonish as our public officials have portrayed it.

The entire Covid Regime is about power, politics, and compulsion. And it always has been. Lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates, incessant testing, travel restrictions, segregated venues, health shaming, and vaccine passports aren’t “health measures”. They’re punishment for those who won’t obey.

And at some point…as always happens when the tools of tyranny take hold…they’ll also be turned on those who do.

JD