I suppose you could say this “triggered” me.

Now let me digress.

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After breakfast, when getting up in the morning, my first thing to do is to go through my emails. I place them in many different categories. One of them is “Covid” related. Another is “job-related.” Still another is “art-related. I could show you an example of the folders I have created for my email; A-D alone is 23 items.

Like my dad, who spent a lot of time reading newspapers and magazines, removing clippings, putting them in piles, and then eventually them ending up in boxes, I do a similar thing, without all the physical evidence.

When cleaning the basement of my parents’ house back in 2001-2002, a project I gave myself, I got to see the legacy of that in boxes and boxes of clippings my dad would eventually “get back to.” There weren’t a ton of boxes, but the clippings represented many hours of work.

Sometimes my backstreet blogging and fork-in-the-road fomenting reflect this.

And throughout the process of sorting emails, there is a concurrent process of reading emails I specifically want to read. Sometimes deliberation means that I will sort, and then read, but then I have to remember what I sorted to read later, and also remember to sort what I read. Of course, I can simply also use the search function in the mail app of my choice, but there is a certain satisfaction in sorting, albeit if I admit also it is largely a superfluous activity aside from vital receipts I receive through email that may have headers and subject matter that are otherwise opaque in nature.

Certain emails will cause me to check on things. Amazon orders, logging into my bank account for its current amount, I will sometimes perform tasks both emergent and planned. Other times, I will open a video deciding I want to learn more about something, or as a reminder to also check it out later…and it becomes one of the many tabs in my browser. If I accidentally close it, I will look through my web history.

And things become scattered after awhile, do they not? Does this make me ADHD?

Some would think so. Just reading through this, I ask “does this not apply to many of us on some level?

When I was growing up, in our progress reports, which mainly dealt with behavior, we had things like “self control” and “works well with others” as benchmarks of our development.

I remember I loved “the listening center” and would finish my work as fast as I could in order to do an activity I liked doing. A lot of the teacher-provided activities were boring to me. Like doing drills seen in an English book, or sample problems in a math book.

Does that make me ADHD?

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And this was back in a time when finishing a worksheet had competition of other “centers” in the classroom. There were also classmates you could pass notes with. You could also have stowed away in your book bag, a book or a magazine. I had a couple of Mad Magazines confiscated.

Now today, the distractions are legion. Many kids have smartphones, a hand computer they can connect to the world with, or a tablet computer. Even if it is not internet-capable, the apps on these things alone can keep kids/children distracted for hours.

Neil Boortz made a bold claim, though back when the ADHD diagnostics were gearing up. And that was, if a kid could play an X Box game for eight hours, they were not ADHD. I think these days, this holds true for many. Give them a task they love, and they could spend hours doing it. If they are interrupted by phone notifications, then turn off notifications. If they can’t go five minutes without checking email, then they should quit the program.

Advertisers count on some form of lack of impulse control. They often use a variety of techniques that elicit and emotional response, The Eagle/Horse Budweiser commercial is a good example of that. Who wouldn’t want to buy some beer after seeing a Clidesdale Pegasus. The synergy and message was one of pinnacle comparison. Budweiser is America.

And advertising is all around us. TV/Streaming/Audio/Email/. You can’t get around it.
It’s no wonder we are impeded from completing tasks, and that our attention wanes.

Add to that—that I doubt there has been much in training our kids in the way of handling downtime. I do not like others attempting to limit or mitigate our access to all this wonderful technology, at the same time, do any of us know any strategies for self-regulation? I know that some apps have features that will limit distractions, but how many of us turn them on?

There are things I will not do. I don’t answer phone calls after 10, and usually am not on my phone at all at night. That doesn’t mean I should apply for sainthood. I love my desktop computer. The notion of doing more than say looking at twitter while at meals is about as far as I go on my phone.

A phone would have been like crack cocaine for me growing up in the seventies.

”But my doctor/specialist diagnosed me with ADHD.”

Doctors can be wrong. My mother, on the six months between symptoms and diagnosis of lung cancer and then in two weeks her death shows that doctors/specialists can be wrong. And they also tend to see their specialization everywhere.

An AI response to the query “Do ADHD specialists see it everywhere?” and there will be a huge rationalization as to why the specialists see it everywhere. Which reminds me of a joke I just thought up.

If someone is walking alone in the forest and is distracted by a squirrel, and trips and falls, will they be diagnosed with ADHD?

A clue in the AI response says it all:

”Undiagnosed Population: Many specialists believe the “everywhere” perception exists because a massive, previously undiagnosed population of adults is only now seeking help as life complexities make symptoms harder to manage.”

Is it that life complexitiees make ADHD harder to manage, or rather, that a more complex life has many sources competing for our attention thus presenting an illusion of ADHD?

In elementary school we had one kid who was considered ADHD/Hyperactive. He literally could not keep still, but I ask, what if he had been allowed to run free at the beginning of the morning? I guess I would have to ask him that.

So was ADHD largely undiagnosed until now, or is it the result of a modern, technologically ubiquitous society?

I think it is the latter, but would love to hear support for why it is the former.

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I’ve heard the time of Covid called many things, and I agree with those assessments. “The Panic” offered by Kitsume is a great one. There was panic. That was for sure. Restaurants were closed, gutted, and reopened. There were mask mandates for ride-share services and at movie theaters. Large gatherings, concerts, and sporting events were cancelled. And then, when reopened, stadiums had cardboard cutouts of people “attending” the games.

There were arbitrary and capricious rules galore.

You had to walk to your restaurant table wearing a mask, but once seated and eating, the mask came off. Applebees had hightop chairs zip-tied together to avoid too many people sitting at them. Voting had people standing six feet apart outside at the different early voting venues.

—And the airwaves were captured and awash with propaganda. You couldn’t walk through a grocery store without the reminder of a “novel, deadly virus” every five minutes.

”If you are experiencing any symptoms such as coughing, sneezing, fever, shortness of breath, please vacate the grocery store immediately.”

There was PSA’s on the radio, covid was in the news of the hour, and it was in the talk radio shows. A commercial break was seldom Covid-free.

”Screaming into the Void” was another metaphor, and it definitely describes those of us who were trying to question even one particle of the narrative. I used a similar metaphor of “screaming into a hurricane” early on. You couldn’t compete with the always-on/always looped propaganda of all that you would see and hear 24/7 anytime you turned on the radio. TV, or check your email inbox.

And if the mainstream media decided again to flip the switch and maintain the level of broadcasting fear and panic, how resilient are we as a society to combat it? I am guessing at least 50% are still vulnerable to it, probably more. As much as we would like mainstream media to be gone the way of the dodo, it will still be with us for some time. And have any of them been held to account for being an accessory to the disruption of our society? They, in their “we didn’t know” assertion of what happened in 2020:

• Ruined businesses

• Caused unnecessary fear and panic.

• Either caused or became the scapegoat of out-of-control inflation and a variety of other ills of our society.

• Contributed to substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

• Isolated the elderly and sick from their loved ones.

• Disrupted supply chains.

• Changed the social contract on how society dealt with illness.

This is the reason why we won’t move on until this gets addressed, and hence why, as six years approach, I still write on it. Why is Fauci not in prison somewhere? Why are a lot of the names and faces of the pandemic not being repeatedly grilled and charged? You can bet that if I broadcast fear-inciting messages every five minutes, I would be in jail and cooling my heels for disrupting the peace.

I’m not making any money off of it. And yes, I would agree there is an element of “fear and panic” in my assessment of what is to come. But only because it is a reality we have faced. Many people’s vectors in life and business were ruined. The plug pulled, the entrances shuttered. And was there an apology? Any effort at restitution? Of course not, because if we save just one person from the blight of Covid, it was worth it.

From many sides, there is very little discussed concerning “was Covid real to begin with?” Don’t get me wrong, there were Facebook accounts that were deactivated in 2020 claiming “Covid was a hoax.” At the time, I thought this was an incorrect assessment, and still do to a degree.

People don’t wind up in the hospital from a hoax.

People did get sick. The latest one I found out about was a friend from high school. He was in the ICU with pneumonia at one point. He claims it was due to COVID. He was smart and did not agree to the protocols. Sedation and ventilation were recommended. He refused, and no doubt, that saved his life.

I don’t argue with him that he got pneumonia. I argue with him that it was COVID. He had a rebranded cold/flu. Unless someone can show me that people never went to the hospital with low blood oxygen before 2020, I will continue to assert this.

“I’ve never been this sick before.”

Yes, all of us will experience this at some point. Never being as sick as we were at one point. This has been something that has been expressed both before and now, since 2020. Why does it have to be COVID? I guarantee you, people before 2020 had the “I have never been this sick before” assertion.

Why do I have all the skepticism? Why not believe there was a novel/deadly virus and be done with it? Maybe a part of it is that I have been confronted by real, deadly diseases in my life.

I had a dad with rheumatoid arthritis. He went (in my mind) from me remembering him running when I was a kid to being wheelchair bound at the end of his life. He tried a number of drugs to help with the symptoms. At one point, one of the drugs contributed to Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which went into remission after he stopped taking it.

Despite being immune-compromised, he never put any parameters on dealing with the public. And he well could have. I wonder what he would make of the people on X discussing their “Long Covid” or “Disability” and complaining about how many people do not accommodate their desire that others mask around them.

A recent Michael Malice interview with a wrestler talks about how the wrestler can no longer interact with people physically. He has to ask them if they are sick. I don’t think my dad ever uttered those words. I remember more than a few times accompanying my dad to the hospital to visit sick friends. He attended parties, reunions, and get-togethers. He was in plenty of restaurants filled with people.

“Son, are you sick? Stay away from me.” was never a phrase in his vocabulary. Some may argue that maybe he would have lived longer had he been more adamant about boundaries and personal space.

Or he may have died a lot sooner, because his happiness in life was derived from going places, doing and seeing things. I think he would have listened to doctors had they told him to limit his interactions with others, especially those who were sick, but would have gone out and interacted with both the sick and healthy anyhow.

Six Years Later and there are still people out there who want to pathologize normal. They have a slideshow carousel of topics meant to cause people to experience fear and panic. Measles outbreaks, bird flu, regular old flu, and the continuing impact of COVID are all on this rotation. The ultimate truth.

Fear and panic sell. And there are those who would like the return of government restrictions. So when I see stories that are clearly propaganda, I comment on them. Because I see propaganda and the global Asch experiment for what it is now. I don’t buy any of it.

We had a pandemic in 2020, but it was a propaganda. The same psychological experiments our government and military turned on foreign citizens, it used on its own citizens, and the legacy and ramifications are still being felt to this day.

And those of us who did not fall for it are like that guy running around like a madman at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” warning the world about the pod people.

#oneofthetwo

It is the latest “mask” hashtag. Some of those who tweet along with these pictures talk about how brave they are for enduring the “gaslighting” that Covid has gone away. A good many of them, ironically, have made it so that only those who mask can reply to them. So they have eliminated the “gaslighting” at least on X. Are their views so fragile that they cannot endure any sort of scrutiny?

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A lot happens at the end of a year. These two weeks of Christmas and New Year’s are like a “dusk” of the year. The days don’t have that “normal day-of-the-week” feeling. I go through my past and take a glance at the future. Because in the weird uncertainty of this certain time of year, there is time to stop and take a breather.

I imagine one of the reasons for the rise of the “oneofthetwo hashtag is because of this. The last thing those who push masking really want is for any sort of reflection to go on, so it’s a good time to refresh the virtue signal.

Still, I ask myself, is it going to be another year of this?

A lot about 2020 still lingers on, so for those who move onto other things, I understand it, but there is still a lot that remains to be done, a lot of loose ends, and unresolved conflicts. Those who say, “It’s in the past, move on.” The problem is that “they” disrupted the social contract, and if you don’t think that all the ridiculousness can return, think again. I have a friend on social media who is sick and has announced he is going to “quarantine” until his sickness is over.

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Before 2020, I had no reservations about hugging loved ones in my life who had a cold, and it still holds true today. If I get sick, I get sick, it’s part of life. If I get sick, and seek cold and flu remedies to mask symptoms, I can also choose to do that. I am not walking around with a loaded weapon if I decide to venture out into society with the sniffles or a cough. I have a cold, not a host for cold fusion.

Even now, as we ring in the New Year, the media (and social media) still rings the gong of fear and panic. This time it talks of superflus, bird flus, and climate change.

—Oh, and massive outbreaks of existential threats like “measles” and “whooping cough.”

I am cynical about any sort of justice, that those who were responsible for COVID will be held to any account. In fact, there is a “black pill” side of me that thinks that all the machinations (whatever they were or are) are in motion. That whoever spawned this idea to pull a lever and unleash a hurricane of panic is already doing its work, and it is too big to stop.

Like ELO’s song “Getting To The Point

https://pie.yt/?v=

The black pill side of me, though, is supplanted by one thing. As long as we breathe, we can do something. Maybe all it is is telling a friend that things are not as bad as they seem, or as the media would have us believe. Maybe it’s posting on X that, although there are still some that mask, well, regardless of what it is they say, masks don’t work to stop diseases. Or maybe it is that simply living a normal life is an example to those who want to live in this overlay faux dystopia that this isn’t the first half of The Stand miniseries.

The fear and panic narrative sinks pretty deep, though. Remember, if you mask and haven’t been sick since, well, you now masks work. But if you are unmasked and haven’t been sick, you’re either lucky or simply asymptomatic, and your inards are being damaged.

The truth is, after a certain age, your organs aren’t working as they did when we were in our twenties, so logging damage to all of our organs and systems will find something, because our bodies are aging.

The fear and panic mentality insinuates itself into many aspects of our lives and shackles us. A lot of those who believe Covid would otherwise kill them had they not masked, and yet they must live with the conundrum of the bare-faced plague spreaders who have lived despite the portents of doom and auguries of their demise.

So until the point comes that I get arrested for writing in disagreement to the establishment narrative, I believe in the turnaround.

Also, I don’t repost these pictures above, thinking they are the ones at fault. In truth, they are the ones I fight for even as I debate them. They are hamstringing themselves, and willing to continue with medical theater for a fictional pandemic that never was…unless you consider the fear and panic propaganda to be some sort of “mind virus.”

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Steve Kirsch related in a recent email header. Chat GBT stated that vaccines lead to autism; therefore, vaccines lead to autism.

Meanwhile, on X, People stating masks work, and that covid was a novel, deadly virus state that Grok says it was, therefore it must be so.

Let me interject, it could very well be that vaccines cause Autism, the problem is that somehow “Chat GPT” confirms it actually means anything. Chat GBT is just another way to affirm the “appeal to experts logical fallacy.”

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I get in discussions with those who use what Grok and Chat GBT as “mic drops” in discussions about COVID. They think, Grok/Gemini/Chat GBT said it, must be true.

All this is bat guano, or chupacabra dung, or unicorn soft serve.

This notion of an unbiased third party might be the defining misnomer of AI. The problem is that these language models use something to base their ideas on, and who makes those decisions? Robots? AI itself? Do they think that AI is presented with all of the volume of written words on the internet and simply studies them to make a determination?

No, rather, it is the algorithms created by programmers. Programmers, and this is passed down from the company executives who decide which sources hold more gravitas than others. After all, can AI determine on its own which holds more “value,” a peer-reviewed paper, or wisdom derived from a Bazooka gum wrapper?

Can AI determine that a peer-reviewed article makes more sense than a pre-print? That The New York Times have more gravity behind its words than the New York Sun?

The AI does not make such determinations of value on its own; it is governed within the parameters that the programmers provided. So if your bit of science does not mesh with or corroborate the establishment’s line of thinking, guess how much the AI will value it.

What at first sounds like unbiased information is biased information. There is a way to present biased information in such a way that it appears unbiased. You can strip certain information of all sorts of biased words, and yet be biased. A big thing that can be done is erasing context. Another thing is only reporting on certain details and leaving others out. A third thing to do is simply emphasizing some things and adding less weight to others.

Before AI answers, there was Wikipedia. Anyone who has any questions about the bias of Wikipedia simply has to listen to one of its founders of it. Recently on Michael Malice, they had one of the founders on, and he stated that unbiased information pretty much was only on wikipedia during its first year of existence. From then on, it basically represented the “establishment” position. And anyone who thinks the establishment isn’t biased must still think the food pyramid is objectively a healthy diet for most Americans.

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There just aren’t enough dissidents to properly balance the equation. And dissidents by their very nature are outliers. And guess how many dissidents are valued more than the establishment position on any subject? If 100 people on the Titanic said that there was no iceburg in the way and the one person who saw it nonetheless stuck to his guns on the subject, still the iceburg and the Titanic would meet.

In a similar fashion, Scientific consensus would win out.

After the survivors on the lifeboat were picked up, those who were wrong about the iceburg would simply say “they didn’t know.” Or that, the information came so quickly in real time, they had to make quick decisions. Don’t think that is possible, all you have to do is listen to those who made a lot of COVID policy in 2020.

This is a simple truth. As good as a steak house might be at making a burger far superior, there is a McDonald’s on every corner. Simply stated, the more sources there are supporting a certain position will render a biased predisposition to that position. And part of pushing the establishment idea is having a glut of it. “More papers support my position, therefore I am right.”

I think of the analogy of the movie Minority Report where at one point the main character comes across an orgy of evidence pointing to someone as the killer abductor of his son. That is the extent of what the “orgy of evidence” has been concerning Covid. Reams and reams of evidence proving the establishment position. And yet, it isn’t true.

Could one of the reasons why the Covid madness was so pervasive and continued be simply the sunk costs logical fallacy? That the policies early on were discovered to be detrimental, and that a large part of doubling down was simply to rationalize the horrible decisions made?

In law, the way to hide the truth is by burying pertinent information in a sea of irrelevant or low-quality information. All the many mask studies done over the past five years are an example of this. Most people will simply believe masks work because of how ubiquitous and plentiful the information is.

I knew this without even having to be told it. It simply is a given that wikipedia is an “unbiased mouthpiece” of the establishment. Any celebrity will tell you their Wikipedia page is rife with errors. How much more are things of alleged substance also wrong?

And AI is no different. AI does not determine which references to value; it is programmed by individuals, and those individuals will no doubt also represent the establishment. And although AI itself is not adulterated in and of itself by agenda, the programmers are.

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Meanwhile, on social media, the blocking continues.

Unless it is just me, I think the blocking is getting worse. It is more frequent and occurs with fewer interactions. How many responses until this person, indoctrinated into the narrative, blocks me? This is to be expected as on their end it is, doing the same thing, arguing with someone who disagrees, and getting the same result, us not coming around to their way of thinking, is insanity. Best to either cut to the ad hominem or to block. Oftentimes, they do both at the same time, most likely to generate the most amount of flaccid outrage. Trigger and do not allow them the ability to respond.

I also own that I may be losing patience with those I converse with. I can only be called ignorant so many times before I may get “short” with people. Just this last Friday, I was called “potatoes for brains,” which makes sense, since I am half Irish. Over the weekend, I was called other names.

When I call “ad hominem,” they say “no, it’s not ad hominem, it’s just an insult.

What do you think ad hominem is?

I’m sure you have seen the memes of “when is an insult just an insult.” I think in the context of friends, it is just an insult because you’re not arguing anything, you’re just “giving them shit,” because shit needed to be given.

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If I started a post and stated to my general feed, “You all have s for brains.” That would be an insult devoid of an ad hominem attack. On X, since I am usually writing in response to something, it is in the context of a debate or argument. So any response to that response, as insulting as it is, is within the context of a debate, whether formal or informal.

It is sad that public debate among strangers breaks down quickly into “insulting one another. or in the context of debate, ad hominem. It’s not that I am against insulting people. I do it all the time in private context among friends, but because I know so little about the people I debate with online, I think it is ridiculous to debase myself down to the point of attacking people’s motives and traits. This is why it is pragmatic to attend to the arguments they make rather than speculate on their reasons for doing so.

This past week on Facebook, another amputee said on his Facebook feed, <It’s that time of year again to get Covid boosters and the flu shot.> He said <we should do our best for our health.> That is paraphrased because he muted or deleted the conversation.

Come to think of it, probably the best thing I could do on these posts I disagree with is to take screenshots of them, because there is a high chance I will never see them again. Thread no longer accessible.

What did I say to get me muted?

Did I call him all sorts of names? Did I use an appeal to experts or a bandwagon logical fallacy? Did I state “you guys do this or that too,” calling hypocrisy on the other side?

No.

I told him that there are many ways to attend to one’s health. One of them is getting informed consent for any interventions taken. That means questioning things like vaccines.

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What I received from him was a number of anecdotes that I believe actually happened, but there are a number of different narratives about how they reached that point. In other words, the story behind what happened to these people he dealt with and what actually happened were different.

This guy who posted is a great guy, very compassionate, very empathetic, and I believe does make a difference in many people’s lives. He certainly made me feel like I wasn’t alone when I first became an amputee. And it’s because I respect him that I wasn’t going to lie to him, or let the “sleeping dogs” propaganda lie.

He stated that one of the people he visited in the hospital got sick at the beginning of COVID before any treatments were available. So I asked follow-up questions. Before COVID, what would they have been diagnosed with?

How did the person know they had “Covid?” The determination for Covid at the beginning of 2020 was someone presenting symptoms synonymous with Covid and also testing negative for the flu. The problem with this is that “before Covid” only 30% of upper respiratory disorders had known sources. So a 70% chance you could test negative for the cold/flu.

Mainly during Covid there were two things at the beginning…symptoms synonymous with the cold/flu and treatment consisting of a new protocol which led to bad outcomes for many patients. Isolation. Designer drugs. Sedation. Intubation. That was the protocol during COVID.

Intubation was an accepted practice because it meant closing of a system that could very well end up transmitting more COVID. Also, the person in question was having trouble breathing. After all, COVID is a novel, terribly deadly virus. Fear is a powerful motivator, even by those who are medical professionals. Get told often enough that those sniffles and that cough are “deadly,” and pretty soon it is deadly.

I know he probably did not like the reinterpretation of what his anecdote was. But imagine if someone believed everything they experienced…how would they view a haunted house they paid to go into. Their reality would be that many people gravitated towards a house filled with serial killers or monsters, where, in reality, they went to a place where people dressed up like serial killers to scare people.

The second anecdote was that in order for him to visit hospitals and do the work he does, handing out materials to new amputees, he is required to be vaccinated. This is fine for him as he has signed a contract to provide valuable information to other amputees. In a hospital setting, he is doing great work in helping people who are otherwise depressed about their recent limb loss. For me, it would be a deal breaker, though, to get mandated vaccinations, as vaccines do not work. And any assertion that they work is an estimate predicated on models.

Using their logic, after my amputation, I have not gotten sick with a cold since my amputation. Thus, limb loss is the reason I no longer get sick. What a ridiculous notion. I could even rationalize reasons why limb loss would lead to better health outcomes. There is less real estate to prevent infection, right? The body at rest doesn’t have to burn as many calories, preventing infection since there is less body mass in which to prevent infection.

On to Anecdote #2.

His second anecdote was to state that the reason why vaccination is needed is that it is required to visit hospitals as an amputation resource. The argument makes no sense. You should get vaccinated because otherwise you will be restricted from doing certain activities, like joining a volunteer organization and attending to new amputees in hospitals?

The answer here is to remove the restriction, not take the intervention.

Finally, he stated another similar issue with a recent COVID-positive person who suffered from the symptoms of “Long Covid.” The problem with this is it is another case of “Covid by PCR,” when in truth the symptoms they could be experiencing are from a variety of similar diseases other than “Long Covid.”

Let’s take a look at, for instance, brain fog. One of the 200 symptoms that are part of “Long Covid.” Before 2020, here are some of the sources of brain fog:

Lifestyle factors

• Poor sleep

• Stress, anxiety, and depression

• Poor diet and dehydration

• Lack of exercise:

• Excessive screen time:

Health conditions

• Long COVID (Wait, how can this be, AI listing this as the first health condition source of Brain Fog?!?)

• Hormonal changes:

• Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)

• Autoimmune diseases:

• Chronic pain:

• Infections:

• Fibromyalgia

• Diabetes

Medications

• Chemotherapy

• Sleeping pills and sedatives

• Other medications: Certain
  
  Of course, now most people will simply jump to “Long Covid.”
  
  And so, instead of addressing these responses, he blocked me. I’d probably block myself as well because I had been refuted three different ways to Sunday. No doubt he probably views me as a “lost cause.” Someone who is one of them “antivaxxers.”
  
  I guess the mainstream media, public health, and other entities can simply repeat the word “Long Covid” enough, and it becomes true, even though there has been no link between this constellation of more than 200 symptoms and Covid, other than they came down with the symptoms after 2020.
  
  And so came the silent treatment.
  
  Shutting people who disagree down is a fairly effective way of dealing with others. Or is it? While I agree that people who harass others should be blocked and that people should be able to block others for any reason, what will the unintended consequences be? If the end result is simply being blocked from friends and family who disagree, then it’s a sad outcome, but reasonable.
  
  But, if the end result goes from silencing others and then mandating they participate in certain interventions, this is a bridge too far. Then it becomes essentially a demand someone made to me on Facebook, “Shut up and get the vaccine.”
  
  No.
  
  I don’t silence others. I don’t view what they say as “dangerous misinformation.” It is propaganda, that much is sure, and I call it such, but I am not calling for it to be silenced. Bring it on. You bring it, I will call it out for what it is, fear and panic propaganda meant to edge us into doing what it is the government wants us to do.
  
  But if in addition the government funds these propaganda campaigns, that is overreach. And it is a sad reality of what we went through since 2020 concerning Covid. Taxpayer money funded the propaganda, which motivated the fear to coerce many to take an unneeded experimental injection. So at first there was Funding. There was Fear, and finally forcing others into taking certain interventions.
  
  
  

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This actually is two different arguments. One being that “some people hate experts,” and “some people blame experts.”

My response:

A reasonable reaction, at least I think so. I am not saying here, “don’t believe any experts.” I am not saying “only believe people who have no expertise,” nor am I saying “you should believe me over any experts.” But these are the reframes of the arguments I get when saying “don’t believe experts merely for the sake of being experts.”

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In MLK anagalous fashion, I would like to be judged on the content of my postings, rather than the speculative tone and motives of them (things that cannot be derived from the text itself).

I did get a reply to this…

This, of course, is a reframe of the argument. In this person’s mind, the argument went from “don’t believe an expert merely for being an expert” to “don’t interact with experts at all.” A different argument completely. I think, in retrospect, I should have replied “There is nothing, just curious” about this.

Secondly, the question of “going to a dentist” and “believing in a dentist” are two different concepts. Most of us who go to a medical professional don’t simply “go to a medical professional.” There are a number of criteria we go through. The first one deals with insurance.

“Are they in-network?” Then there are other questions. How long have they been a dentist? What do other patients say about them? Many times, a dentist will get a referral as well.

Brian continues to ask questions and make statements here that sound more like an interrogation.

Brian wants to make this into “but you do accept people based on their expertise, so you are wrong about this.

That isn’t even true. I think before 2020, many of us did believe “the experts.” Another writer on Substack, el gato malo, would call it one of the perks of a high-trust society to be able to go to just about any “dentist” and be assured you will get a good teeth assessment and maintenance. But what happens when the experts turn out to have odd notions, or are not competent at all? Let’s say a dentist believed in “high friction food items” to help clean teeth, or foods with high acidic content that would, in their mind, reduce plaque and other agents that might cause gum disease.

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Because I won’t simply roll over and let Brian have his “gotcha,” he then, of course, rolls in ad hominem attacks into the discussion. Twice, he talks about my possible affiliation with Q Anon groups, and then goes into “tone policing” territory and accuses me of “crying, whining, and accusing him of micro-aggressions” when I am just calling balls and strikes. Does an Umpire “cry” about balls and strikes?” Is an editor “crying” about typos and grammatical artifacts? Does a mechanic “cry” about a old air filter?

Instead of focusing on the argument “don’t believe an expert merely for being an expert,” the main focus of Brian’s response is to understand my reasoning for questioning experts. And in addition, to find if I did indeed trust experts merely for being experts. His speculation concerning my motives for doing things goes into ad hominem territory, and it is much easier to focus on that rather than the argument itself.

Brian could have made it less ad hominem if instead he had asked.

What are the criteria used for going to a dentist?

What is the criterion used for going to an auto mechanic? A good plumber? An orthopedic surgeon?

I could see what Brian was getting at, though. He peppered his inquiries with “honest question, simple question, just curious,” And if anyone hears such predicates in conversation, just know that you are not being asked an honest, serious, or “just curious” question. Rather, this would, in a courtroom, receive an “objection, leading the witness,” response from a lawyer.

It is my speculation that they wanted to be able to accuse me of believing in experts merely for being experts, which is the one exception to ad hominem. It isn’t ad hominem to say:

”This guy, who says, ‘don’t believe in experts merely for being experts’ believes in experts merely for being experts.’ And if I did, that would be a valid argument.”

The problem with this ad hominem exception is that it would not be hypocrisy if the person admitted to a past of “believing the experts” and cited that as one of the reasons not to.

There are plenty of people who are “anti-vaxxers” who, at one time, were pro-vaccine. They became vaccine skeptics when they themselves suffered, or their children suffered from a vaccine injury. There are plenty of us who are “masking skeptics.” they have worn masks religiously, and yet, have gotten sick. They have also witnessed those who do not mask not getting sick, so at the very least, realize that masking does not equate with being infection-free. It’s a bit more nuanced than that.

Unless they suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance in thinking that those not sick from Covid who never masked are asymptomatically sick, and those who do mask who are not sick is proof that masks work.

When I point out these artifacts of a “sarcastic tone,” I get accused of “dodging” the questions. No, I recognize the questions for what they are: “leading the witness.” And I recognize the ad hominem attacks for what they are “undermining the credibility of the witness.”

At the end of our conversation, he attempts another reframe of what occurred in a conversation.

If there is anything I can impart to others involved in X or any platform where interaction is part of it. Neither party in the debate can arbitrate what happened. The only true determination can be made by the reader.

There is a difference between “policing” rhetoric strategies and “tone policing.” I make no determination of motives of Brian in his writing, merely point out when the strategies are used. If I started speculating on Brian’s emotional state, that would be adding my label to his statements; tone policing. If I point out gaslighting, tone policing, and ad hominem, these are legitimate criticisms of the statements made.

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In truth, I imagine Kimmel will be back, if not on broadcast TV, but in the podcast format. And he has someone with experience to show him the ropes, and who has remained loyal to him in spite of their political differences, Adam Carolla. I also do not think that Jimmy Kimmel has talent. I think at some point, his compassion was weaponized against him, like many people during Covid. It doesn’t excuse their bad behavior, but rather explains it.

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This last week, there was a lot of talk about “free speech” by the same people who most likely loved the Facebook Fact Checkers, the Twitter Deplatforming, and other forms of censorship throughout the pandemic. After all, any disagreement is “dangerous misinformation.” You know, like Covid being a novel, deadly virus. The vaccine does not stop transmission or infection. Or that social distancing was a fiction made up on the spot.

As I hear other late-night comedians weigh in on the after-dark Kimmel-ectomy, I wonder where they stood on the COVID restrictions and the censorship of those who dissented. With some exceptions, they were silent or likely colluded. A good indicator of where they would be on the spectrum of people who would rat out Anne Frank. If you’re like me, you have a Mount Rushmore of people who you remember really were bad actors in favor of the fear and panic propaganda during COVID. A lot of those featured above would fill the face of that Mount Rushmore, or as it would be renamed, Mount Rushmore-To-Censor.

Conservatives argue that there should be consequences for reckless speech. Kimmel himself made such an argument on the firing of Rosanne Barr. Try yelling “Fire” in a movie theater and see how often you get invited back. Or, if you work for a movie theater, imagine if you gave out an opinion on movies while someone is buying a ticket. It might not be the best venue to trash-talk a movie someone is excited to see.

I often argue the question of venue.

For instance, although I do not watch much football, I thought Colin Kaepernick taking a knee was exploiting his job to express his freedom of expression concerning systemic racism. He could have taken a knee in front of the Supreme Court building, or some other governmental institution, to speak out against “systemic racism” outside of a football game, and this would be completely acceptable. But the NFL doesn’t have to pay him for his activism during a game. To be honest, if he had said something like “they may fire me, but I felt I had to take a stand,” this would have earned more respect. “Though they may fire me, yet I shall take a stand…by taking a knee.”

Similarly, if I took advantage of the venue of a televised game to write horrible things on posterboard about people I disagree with, I too should be simiarly ousted from a football venue. Those who grasp the idea of freedom of speech also understand that, at times, there will be consequences for it.

Case and point. I got into a fight with a friend after I called his mother the “B” word. We got hauled into the principal’s office and I stated at the time it was my fault for starting the fight (and since I related this here should remove all virtue from the action as I repeated it to you). I think my friend got off free, and I ended up cleaning erasers and stacking chairs for the janitors to mop for a couple of weeks for my trouble. The thought of claiming that I was simply expressing my right to free speech never even occurred to me as a defense of insulting my friend’s mom.

I knew there would be consequences, and I was clearly in the wrong. The only time I use the B word now is when I sing along to the Outkast song “Roses.”

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The weirdness from the left, though, cannot be understated.

Somehow, they think that those doing the happy dance on Charlie Kirk’s memory should still be employed, and those of us who mourn his death should have to free associate with these people. Sorry, but no. Bad behavior means consequences.

While the debate between free speech (which should be allowed) and reckless speech (which should have consequences), there are also reasons why Kimmel was ousted to begin with, and it had little to do directly with “free speech.” There was talk that Kimmel had low ratings, only 129k in a key advertising demographic who would see the Kimmel show and be influenced to buy things. He had a million viewers, most of whom were over 50, which is NOT a key demographic. Most of us over 50 are not impulsive buyers of whatever it is they are selling. His popularity has dropped over the years, and even more so due to the lack of desire to watch “appointment television.” No one should discount the change in the way we watch content as another reason, among many, for Kimmel’s popularity having fallen.

But I would argue that the reasons he still had a job are as important as the reason why he is currently suspended. And in the case of Kimmel and other hosts, never underestimate SPITE. Specifically, spite in regard to Trump, and more broadly, traditional values.

I would bet that, among other things, Jimmy Kimmel managed to retain employment because of spite. His ratings had been tanking for a while. So one of the few reasons why they kept him is because the network, and by proxy the mainstream media, didn’t want to give any indication of supporting Trump. They supported the previous administration.

Dave Smith had a similar view in that Jimmy Kimmel, like it or not, signed onto the “regime” that supported the narrative pushed by the government. So he really isn’t acting as a free agent any longer. This explains why, despite his lack of popularity, he still had a job.

And you can see this echoed in various industries. The reason why corporations traditionally would stay out of politics is that such adaptations backfired or failed. Look at Bud Light. Gillette, and most recently, Cracker Barrel. But these industries had been woke-ified, and spite proved more of an incentive than the traditional one that a business usually has: to make money.

Embracing DEI has similar responses. The deep undercurrent in a lot of this is spite. Spite that will remain even as all reality shows and proves that embracing a certain ideology over having a good product leads to ruin. You can choose people for any reason under the sun other than merit, but it still won’t make a better product. Does this mean that people not of a certain demographic cannot produce great things? Course not. But the problem is, when your focus is no longer merit, then trust is lost that there will necessarily be a quality product or service from the business employing that policy.

If I told you that my basketball team only employs short people, because short people have a right to also be represented in Basketball, how much faith would you have in my team making it to the finals? Now, I very well could be employing some people who can jump extremely high and dunk better than the tallest people. However, I would wager that those betting on games will be betting against the diminutive ball players.

And still spite soldiers on.

You don’t see woke idealism permeate sports because the metric for excellence is tangible. But you will see it early and often in the arts. “Representation” has been huge in the arts as of late, rather than the craftsmanship and skill of creating good art. And although art is not as tangible in measuring quality, there still exist ratings. Look at the Ghostbusters movie with an all-female cast, or Ocean’s Nine, or the reboot of Overboard, all with “representation” in mind.

While Spite does exist as a reason for certain properties, it is not a good basis to create a quality product.

At some point, if not already, there will be books and movies on wokeness and they will be of a fine quality and scathing in their indictment of augmenting marginal talent, as well as an indictment of spite as a source for much of the low-quality content that permeates our current culture.

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But at times during the original DOGE audit, there were also talks of efficiency. And this is something I don’t necessarily want. A government that is efficient will be a government that is intrusive. I also think that it is something that the founders of the government did not want. I doubt anytime those who penned the Declaration Of Independence were sitting around ruminating “What we really need is an efficient government.” The governments of their previous country were enough to send them to “The New World.”

Say what you want about democracy and republic, but I think one of the geniuses of our government is to separate its powers to keep it out of the way of its citizens, at least in its original incarnation. I imagine now, though, if you peel back the seperated political tectonic plates, there will be revealed a root system of connective tissue between them. And this bears out in my reading. Look no further than the odd synchronization of policy that the world adopted during COVID, and something doesn’t smell quite right. It speaks to not only a centralization of power, but one that exists internationally.

I also don’t think the founders wanted a “set it and forget it” kind of government. I think they wanted us on our toes, constantly tweaking it, and over time…as we saw fit, continue separating powers. They wanted us to be skilled trimmers of the wild weeds of government, coming in and pruning as needed.

And the way to make our government more effective Constitutionally is to make it more ineffective.

And you imagine that the founding fathers would want the government to weigh in on what we would do in case we got a cold over the winter? Of course they wouldn’t. They would think that the responsibility should be retained by the citizenry to make such determinations. Yet here we are.

In Washington’s Farewell Address as President he states:

”It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”

Sadly, in our current government, there is very little self-restraint. In fact, it could be argued that instead of “self restraint” there is “self indulgence” allowing judges to legislate from the bench, and likely, for the executive branch to be judge and jury concerning our liberties. Declarations of emergency and the executive orders associated with them.

The beauty of our government in its inception was the realization of many of the human flotsam jetsam and frailities within it. So that instead of dictators or monarchs rising and falling, there would be a continuation of government based on the mitigation and hamstringing of its powers and keepting them separate, lest there be too much centralization of power.

But as Washington eludes, it’s not something that can be maintained on paper alone, but rather through an understanding of absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus, much care must be employed by the people who administer such power to do so with caution, and the realization that such brandishing of power leads inexorably to the buttressing and centralization of such power.

We see how powerful Trump can become in his wielding of the Executive Orders, how much more will it be so once our opponents do so? And we saw this as well in the previous administration during vaccine and mask mandates.

The golden rule would keep us in check. It’s simple. I doubt many in power want others telling them what to do, and what liberties they can and can’t have, and thus, this informs their ability to not exercise power over others. That is if these people were self aware.

I don’t think many people are that aware of themselves. They simply view power as something to be wielded, and they, through appointment or vote, view themselves as now entitled to do so. I doubt there are even a few politicians who view themselves as “servants of the people” but rather believe that they have some sort of mandate to step in and determine what it right for us, and have a poor opinion that we can determine ourselves what is best for us.

Washington continues:

A just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield.

This sounds like a warning against things like “government efficiency” and “executive orders.” Free governments will be destroyed by these inroads. But in light of the last five years, it is something more than that as well. I wonder what Washington would make of our social media ubiquity. What would he think of all the propaganda being pushed by the media? What would he think of many corporate entities falling all over. themselves to support and introduce Covid restrictions of their own. There were no Constitutional Amendments introduced during this time with “Covid clauses.” Instead, these entities simply employed policies without any input by their customers.

It was a way to go around direct “usurpage.” But how else can it be viewed other than many policies employed against people, be it for moralistic reasons, not to kill grandma, or under the ridiculous motto “we are all in this together.”

If we were all in this together, then where was the free exchange of ideas? Where were the long town hall meetings and the court of public opinion, where we discussed options, and even got to weigh in if the situation was dangerous enough to warrant them at all?

That being said, I welcome the pruning of Government, and hopefully, over these next four years, there is a return to sanity. I hope we get a clearer vision of the separation of powers, and perhaps a greater need for the golden rule to govern our actions, and an acknowledgement that within us all is a desire to wield power over others, and this alone should be reason to stay our hand against doing so.

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I was on a Twitch stream last night, and I was disappointed.

What is Twitch? Twitch is a streaming platform wherein you can show yourself playing a game, painting a picture, singing karaoke, or wearing revealing clothing if you are hot. It is a “live show” platform that has been around for a decade or so. It completes with Facebook Live and Youtibe Live.

In my case, I was watching an artist work. They were creating caricatures of friends in a thematic background illustration. I enjoyed the experience as I was also creating art at the same time, and like the “communal experience”…but then came talk from another member of the chat.

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”I went to Disney World and got Covid,” was his news. I was full of questions, but asked none. Because I already knew all was lost. They were already up and running in the Covid narrative. Questions like:

”How did you know it was Covid?”

"Did you test yourself?”

”Did you quarantine yourself?”

”Did you call others up you came in contact with to inform them of your disease?”

”Did you mask?”

”Were you up on your vaccines?”

”Before 2020, did you ever get sick?”

I wish we could go back to the day when we understood that one of the possible side effects of traveling to another region is that sickness usually occurs. I remember, for instance, traveling from Georgia to NYC in 1986 and feeling “stopped up” the whole time in NYC. Did I think I got a novel, deadly disease? No, I thought…regional change usually results in some minor symptomatic reaction from the body. Same with going from cold to hot, drops in barometric pressure, sleep habits, and dietary changes. And travelling from a suburban to an urban setting.

Back in the nineties, I had a work friend who would get sick every time he travelled. So, COVID only exists in other regions? That would be one of the narratives that people would tell themselves. Far easier to think: you travel, you get sick. So you can avoid this by simply not traveling, or maybe pack some cold remedies if you are prone to these responses.

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People don’t blame COVID when it gets stormy out and their bones start to ache. So why in the Samuel L Jackson do they blame COVID for traveling to a different part of the world? Why don’t we blame COVID for a headache?

Then over the course of about fifteen minutes. their commenced a discussion on masking, updating vaccination, and I just couldn’t.

The streaming host stated, “You guys mask…or do what I do and just don’t go anywhere.”

They also discussed the new strain of COVID with the “razor blade throat” symptom. At this time, I wanted to scream. Apparently these people either went on Web MD or saw a post like this one:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-variant-nb181-causing-razor-blade-throat/story?id=123004186

My reaction: I wanted to scream the following:

”ONE OF THE SYMPTOMS OF A COLD IS A SORE THROAT…AT TIMES LIKE RAZORBLADES.”

I have stated this on X with strangers, but these are “online friends.” Thankfully, I was not streaming myself as they would see me, screaming into the camera, “Get over yourself.”

I sometimes think this is some distorted version of the movie Fight Club, where there are composition notebooks filled with text and covers that state “This is Jimmy’s Covid diseased pancreas,” or “This is Jimmy’s neurologically challenged Covid addled brain.”

They act as if this new “strain” of COVID has a novel symptom different than any other symptom ever presented. Before we had “loss of taste or smell,” and I think the last one had one about a cough that was persistent. Now it’s “razorblade throat?”

We should probably get ready for the following variants:

”Stopped up nose.”

”Aching”

”Loss of Appetite”

”Mild Fever”

”Runny Nose”

”Upset Stomach”

”Dry irritated nose”

”Feeling Tired.”

”Mildly uncomfortable.”

In this day and age of “living your truth” and “there is no one like you, you are awesome,” there will inevitably be this sharing of each of our own cold symptoms as if they are unique and noteworthy.

I thought the bottom was when I saw on X a podcaster record his “covid symptoms” for all to hear.

I was wrong.

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What could be the problem with spreading COVID-19 fear and panic propaganda 24/7 in 2020? The propaganda was for our own good, wasn’t it? I mean, what more noble cause is there than preventing disease? A novel deadly disease that could wipe out 3% of the population is a bad thing, and no one wants to deprive a family of Grandma or a child, much less the young and healthy, able-bodied worker.

I remember well all the incidents of young and healthy people tragically struck down due to COVID-19. I can’t tell you how often I saw someone college age, lying in the gutter, in the front lawn, slumped over steering wheels, mask half undone, in their cars. Remember all the photos of the millions of young people lying prostrate on benches, and rolling around in MARTA trains here in the deep south, only to be procured by the cleaning staff after the stench became too much to bear? I can call up all of the headlines and stories now.

Oh, wait—

The problem is that what if there was no actual emergency? What if all the doomsayers never actually produced any doom? What if there were no freezer trucks slowly rolling through every community with figures in moon suits collecting the dead with the frequency of milk delivery from the 1960s in this dire dystopia? What if drive-thrus, big box stores, and other corporate edifices still remained open under the banner of “essential services?” What if the “soft lockdown” were merely allowing people the ability to drive with no place to go?

Yes, people died in 2020, and people are still dying now in 2025. The main difference is that they aren’t being misattributed as Covid deaths. That person that died in 2019, died of whatever it was they died of, whether it was old age, complications due to diabetes, or they fell off a ladder and died as a result of their injuries.

And in 2020, they all died of Covid as proven by (early on) symptoms of Covid (the same as symptoms for colds and flus) and then later on as proof by a positive PCR test.

Smash cut to 2025, and there are some that still live in the tainted salad days of 2020, where everything is Covid. For them, the big story was that one of the officials in Texas responsible for flood response was asleep because he was sick. And as we all know, the floods in Texas that July 4th weekend resulted in over 150 dead..and those were needless deaths, not due to floodwaters, but Covid.

Someone posted on their X account that this official William Thomas, the one person standing between life and death of those at a summer camp, had Covid. So what was the cause of the deaths from the flood? Why it was because they had been exposed to someone sick… because they had Covid.

Nowhere in the article says they have Covid, none of the adjacent news reports. You can keep looking and looking. But of course, because of the fear and panic narrative, there has to be one reason why. Now, they are lying about COVID.

I took the time to read the article” I realized it wasn’t that at all..it was ‘seeing Covid’ where Covid was not mentioned at all.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kerr-county-emergency-coordinator-defends-flood-response-weeks-silence-rcna222225

And when I pointed that out, I got responses about how the only unseasonal sickness to get is Covid. When I mentioned “Summer Colds,” they used personal anecdotes of only having one bad summer cold to date that they can remember. So the logic here is “Since summer colds were rare to almost non-existent for me, it must be Covid that caused this lack of a quick response to the flooding in Texas.”

The conversation, which took place in bits and bytes over the following days, devolved into name calling, more logical fallacies, dragging a couple of other people to also unload ad hominem attacks, and of course to expand the conversation from a mere “misappropriation of Covid to a non-Covid story” to the more broad lack of efficacy of masks, vaccines, and a variety of the ridiculous restrictions employed during Covid.

Meanwhile, 150 people died in the Texas floods.

I will add an aside here. The reaction to this story is to blame the government, but I thiink the government is working as intended here, and this is one of the many reasons why we should not imbue government with these responsibilities to begin with, and in lieu of that, the government that should be responsible is as close to the emergency as possible. So don’t rely on the national guard or FEMA to step in when flash flooding occurs ina particular region, rely on the closest city or county government to at least provide information.

But don’t think to yourself that the government is going to rescue you at all.

The X account shown above accused me of making this my sole preoccupation when I wasn’t the one posting about stories that didn’t mention Covid, as Covid stories to begin with.

In a continuous effort to shut me up, they also delved into another interaction on X wherein I shared my experience as an amputee living in a long-term care facility due to my own bad choices (or lack thereof). I don’t deny this; none of this is news. Part of the freedom to make choices is to make bad ones, or in the absence of making any choices at all, having ones made for me. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as frightening as being discharged from a hospital and not really knowing where you are going.

It’s one of the reasons I write. There are people out there who would like nothing better than to take away people’s freedom in what they believe is best for them.
It makes sense, and there is an upside: you don’t have to blame yourself for your shitty decisions and shortcomings. But the ass end of that is that your freedom has been eroded.

Should you be forced to accommodate my bad choices?

I could be posting every day about seeing “vaccine injury” or “the effects of long-term mask use” in every story I see. And let’s face it, on line between Covid and Vaccine injury there is a mode of thought that is latent from the episodes surrounding the last five years. Anytime we see a story about someone suddenly suffering, we wonder if it is COVID-19/or the mRNA injection.

No doubt a lot of bad endings occur due to the pandemic declaration in 2020, but I don’t think it is the “novel, deadly virus.” It was the over-response to a cold and flu season. And because of all the 24/7 propaganda, all that is seen is “Covid” in stories where it does not exist.

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The main thrust of this post is not to discount psyops, but being in a mindset that there is “a psyop around every corner” is not a good way to go through life. I think we do have to be vigilant in our skepticism, but at the same time, we can’t discount everything as propaganda and psyops, even as many things can be used for that purpose.

First, what is a psyop?

A great example of a psyop is what happened to us back in 2020. Radio, TV broadcasts, grocery store PA systems, newspapers, magazines, websites, emails, regular mail, store signage, even comics and animated ads all pushed forth the notion that there was a novel, deadly virus and that it was decimating us. Heck, if they thought there was any value in it, they probably would have employed skywriting, semaphore, and smoke signals to further punctuate the Covid narrative.

What was the intention? Well, the intention, in my speculation, was the scare the shit out of as many of us as possible in order to coerce us into behaving in a certain way.

And it worked, unless you were an “essential worker.” If you were an essential worker, you were a brave hero going out into a world mired in disease and fighting to keep the lights on, food on the table, and shelter over our heads.

When you go to the media and corporate level of psy-op, it becomes clear that it was what it was. The media was in synch with the sick psy-op. Corporations were falling over themselves to show they were in compliance with the restrictions.

However, when you are at our level (civilians) there is not very many people that are running or part of a psyop. They are simply the ones complying. I doubt most of the people you speak to on social media or in conversation in daily life are knowingly part of a Psyop. But they do have their reasons for participating in it. Yet, essentially, you are just dealing with another person who in the Asch experiment, heard the bell, in this case, the announcement that there was a novel, deadly virus, and stood up…or behaved accordingly.

So when you read a neighbor’s rant about other neighbors not wearing masks outside during the pandemic, they are not employed by the government or a conspiracy to do so. It is far more likely they are victims of indoctrination rather than composers of the propaganda symphony.

The same could be said of politicians. Many of them, like the rest of society, were subject to the COVID psyop. They became part of the mass formation, but unfortunately, they also employed some of the policies during COVID that turned our world into the weird, dystopian, hamstrung version it currently is. This is on them. They should have known better.

At the very least, they should have recognized that a lot of the restrictions and regulations were not based on any sort of Constitutional Principle. There is no “pandemic clause” in the Constitution. There is no “in case of a deadly novel virus, our rights have to be suspended.”

So what are examples of the psyop? Check these morsels out:

•There was a novel, deadly virus.

•It was spreading through the population, and it could be as bad or worse than the Spanish flu.

• It could kill anyone. young old, healthy, sick, short, tall…it could kill anyone at any time.

•In order to combat it, there needed to be lockdowns to prevent transmission

• If you have to be out in public, wear a mask.

• Avoid large gatherings.

•15 days to stop the spread.

• The science is settled.

What isn’t a psyop, though?

Nutty people adopting a given ideology or idea do not necessarily make a psyop.

But reporting on those people could be part of a psyop. So, for instance, you want to say “people who are antivaxxers are nuts,” you could simply do this by making sure everyone you interviewed about being against mandatory vaccination held very weird views.

I can think of one example of this easily. One of the first groups to be against the vaccine and for alternative treatments of “Covid” was the Frontline Doctors. Among them was a woman who also believed that illnesses were caused by sexual congress with demons. It was Stella Immanuel. I liked Stella Immanuel when she talked about the hydrochloroquine treatment for Covid. Did not so much like her in terms of credibility when she related the demon congress leading to sickness notion she had.

So the logical conclusion one could make from enough of these types of people being “against mandatory vaccination” is to assume anyone who holds a view similar to that is “nutty.” And yet, I was already against the vaccine long before it was announced that it had been produced “at record speed.”

The same government that can’t fix a pothole after years now contends it has created a vaccine for a novel, deadly virus in ten months?

This whole “discredit by association” strategy was employed by many “pro-vaccine” accounts on Twitter. A doctor on Twitter talked about “pseudoscience” and would talk about things most people believe are nutty. And then would lump anyone who dissented against mandatory vaccination into his cycle of posts.

Was he part of a psyop, though?

I don’t know. I certainly never claimed he was. I merely pointed out his behavior, which eventually led to him blocking me. He didn’t have to say that those who are against the experimental injection believed in pseudoscience are called nutty. The mere fact that he only posted on issues of pseudoscience did all the heavy lifting for him.

I have seen people who are against the COVID narrative, and they stretch along a large swath of opinions. There are many who believe in the lab leak theory, there are others who believe in the wet market one. There are others like me who think it is a false dichotomy. There are some who believe that both the virus and the vaccine are novel and deadly. There are others who think parts of the world were deliberately poisoned to mimic a spreading virus. There are some who believe that the whole thing, from the very beginning, was fake.

And now there are those of us, and I count myself among those now, who think that everything we know about virology and vaccinology is fake. That the whole process wherein a virus is “determined to be a virus” is actually what results in artifacts known as viruses and not the actual “infected sample” itself, as it cannot be directly extracted from the sample.

I don’t think that people who differ along this swath of different opinions are “controlled opposition” or part of a “psyop.” But certainly anything along the swath of these opinions could be used as Psyops.

In the end, it all depends on what someone supports in terms of policy.

If you believe in the novel deadly virus, and yet still believe I have the right to decide what interventions to take, or how much risk I am willing to manage, then we are on the same side. We’ll unravel any variations of our opinions through conversation later on.

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According to them, I am a virus denier. I think a better way of putting it is a “virus agnostic.” But far from me to demand that other people adhere to my adjectives. My adjectives, like my pronouns, are “your” and “choice.”

This week, in particular, I did deeper dives into smallpox and polio. Each time I encounter a virus and think, “well, certainly there will be a problem here where the ‘no virus’ theory does not properly address it. And then—hold my cocktail of undetermined ingredients, it gets complicated.

I didn’t know that there was pretty much a terrain theory going around since the advent of virology. But it’s there, we just never heard about it in school, highschool, or higher education. But I am no biologist and chemist, and there might indeed be long talks and discussions about it, and imagine what they must think of any other theory other than germ theory. It has to be given its due diligence, right?

I am pretty much all Dunning/no Kruger on what I don’t know. Very confident that I have reached expert status in what I don’t know. My question often is

“Why isn’t everyone else?”

I knew that there always has been dissent to the virus|vaccine narrative, heard passing words about it, but I managed to read a couple papers on it, as well as some overview on the history of virology as well as the type of people "these early pioneers” were. Just the origins of vaccination alone should send up red flags, flares, smoke signals, and emphatic semaphore gestures of issues. Grinding the spines of corpses into a powder?

X:Factor: The Inciting Event

First, the inciting event, the original post was a X account called “Outbreak Updates” and you can imagine what the various posts are throughout the day. They are “sky is falling” updates about measles, tuberculosis, and the bird flu. I imagine there is money in keeping the fear train going. There is certainly no money in trying to derail it, or followers, or any sort of response. But as most know, If it bleeds, it leads. Nothing bleeds more than a good pandemic, or a possible pandemic story. The story itself was concerning “two new cases of measles found in some obscure town in the US.” Run away! Stop drop and roll! It’s the end of the world!

Under one of the responses is someone asking the question,” Is this healthy? I stated that it is normal to become infected with a mild disease.

From there, I received the usual things you would expect.

A lot of augmenting the measles symptoms. “Mild death,” I believe, was one of the terms my dissenters used.

A lot of focus on “the children” but ignoring childhood accidents, which is THE leading cause of children's deaths. Look on their X profile, I wonder how often the leading cause of childhood fatalities is discussed in their ongoing tweets…I hope your sitting down, there is no results from “childhood accidents” in their account. So for someone so concerned about children, very little care is taken about the leading cause of death among them.

So much easier, apparently, to demand everyone get a measles vaccine to save 500 people a year (including children) vs. maybe thinking of childproofing all manner of things to prevent accidents. Common sense things like locking your guns in a gun locker. having a properly locked gate around a pool, keeping toxic things out of reach of small children.

That’s just the beginning, though, as there is also:

• A lot of ad hominem attacks.

I’ve talked about this before, and thankfully, this week, one of the dissenters, when he mistook my insulting myself as insulting the other people around me, stated (I am paraphrasing) “insulting people is basically waving the white flag.” Indeed, it is. They mistake my calling out as ad hominem, and I agree it is annoying to do so, as “crying about being mocked.” That’s not why I do it at all. It is exposing the quality of their argument.

Ironically, though, he kept reposting one of the accounts that was attacking me personally.

• A lot of other logical fallacies.

In addition to ad hom, there is “appeal to experts, bandwagon, and strawman arguments. I can’t tell you how many times I dealt with “summarizations” of my positions that weren’t even close to them. This is what straw man attacks are. I too could simply knock down my own arguments if I made the same sort of “revisions” to the positions that clearly were not the positions taken.

For instance, one of the issues surrounding measles vaccination is that before the vaccine was introduced, only 500 out of 150 million people in the US at the time died from measles each year. This is all people, not just children. My assertion that getting a mild disease is part of normal life did not bode well for them. They think that me not getting a vaccine is synonymous with “being okay with children dying.”

Also, as usual, I was asked about my published research papers concerning smallpox, measles, or polio. Remember, if you dissent from the narrative, you have to be a PhD, but if you affirm the narrative, your education isn’t questioned.

• A lot of gaslighting

There was a long-standing part of the interaction where, earlier in the conversation concerning the work of Alfred Wallace, registrar records indicated that smallpox infection rates were the same among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. And that in a town of mostly unvaccinated people, their infection rates dropped after rains cleaned out naturally the sewers of and English down. When confronted and asked about what toxins were present in the sewage that caused smallpox, I conceded I did not know, but wouldn’t have infection and mortality rates have stayed the same if the cause of smallpox were a virus, and not due to environmental toxins?

Later on, smallpox on blankets was brought up by them asking again what could be the source of smallpox…or what toxins were on the smallpox blankets. I stated that due to my answer to the same question in another similar context, the answer was the same. I understand that I could have simply said “Like in the previous example, my answer is still the same, since I was not there, and no one else extracted samples of the filth of various London towns where the smallpox outbreak occurred, nor where the smallpox blankets were taken from poorly maintained and cleaned “smallpox hospitals” the toxins in the sewage, and on poorly cleaned blankets are unknown.

Then I could have stated, “Also, so we are clear, any other outbreaks or situations where smallpox is mentioned, and I am asked about the specific toxins that could have been present, the answer will be the same: I don’t know.”

Instead of asking Grok which despite its limitations, can actually give decent answers regarding what is and is not said in a given interaction on X, or doing an advanced search, there are simple ways people can figure out if content was covered, and asking the same question in a different context was, and as it was asked repeatedly, badgering.

A lot of sharing studies that defend the narrative, but don’t explain about the “not following the science” of having proper control experiments to the way that “viruses” are cultured and isolated.

Bottom line: There was a time when I, too, thought that any talk against vaccination was crazy. Jenny McCarthy in my mind, was the well-crafted version of Charlie McCarthy. But because of the constant pressure against those who dissent against taking experimental injections, they have coerced many of us to look into not only mRNA “vaccines” but to check out the background behind vaccines and virology to begin with.

Turns out, the foundation is shaky and sketchy.

No wonder they keep turning up the ad hominem and logical fallacy volume to 11.

What is it so people are afraid to hear?

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One of the biggest changes since 2020 is our relationship to sickness, and not in a good way. Some may argue this, and please do, I love a good argument. And you could very well change my mind on this subject. However, if your argument is to “save the vulnerable” I still maintain that the vulnerable should stay home if they find coughs and sniffles and other symptoms “imminently dangerous.”

Like diving boards, helmets, playground equipment, and all other “safety-fying” aspects of our lives, now sickness has taken a turn for the worst. Getting sick now is a Defcon 1 type situation that requires almost fallout shelter isolation status, hazmat suits, and James Bond levels of espionage to determine contact tracing.

We must do all that we can to avoid infection because infection is death. Like this guy below, who is doing something akin to calling in a fake bomb threat. I mean, both his parents actually went to work after coming in contact with him. There should be a warning at least at the beginning of the movie. Warning: Simulated scenes of sickness and casual treatment of coming in contact with infirm individuals."

Maybe some of you were adults before 2020.

It used to be you would rarely stay home when sick, but go to work, and save the sick days for beautiful weather when you wanted to “play hooky.” You would call into work “sounding sick” although I never understood this.

You don’t have to sound sick to call in nauseous, or have a debilitating headache. There are many ways to call in sick without any “theater” involved. And yet part of the ritual of calling in sick was to “sound sick.” And the thing is, most employers don’t want to know or are not interested in your symptoms. They aren’t some judicial body determining disease deceit. They are probably just wondering if they can find a new cog to fill the job you did…or if they can go “cogless” for a day. Note to others: beware of working at a place where the schedule is written in pencil.

It used to be back in the far distant past before 2020, if you did get sick and felt well enough, you would take some treatments to lessen the symptoms and go about your day. You’d show up to work, and it wouldn’t be considered a health violation to have a box of tissues at your desk or involuntary manslaughter to cough and sneeze at your desk.

You can find commercials for “cold remedies” everywhere. Dayquil, Sudafed, etc. But now, the new "social contract" is "stay home/stay safe," and the supposition is that going to work/about your day is "endangering other people." Look out, grandma! Junior has a cold! Hey Corporate America, Gertrude is your new Patient Zero Employee as she comes to work with a case of the sniffles.

During COVID, there was the Quarantine Carousel. Mileage may vary, but if you timed it right, you could probably be on the Quarantine Carousel for weeks on end. You would hear stories about people “tested positive” or merely were “contact traced” in association with a positive individual. That alone could get you into quarantine. And it was “10 days” in Quarantine. You could stay/home/safe or in some areas of the world, like in Philadelphia, you could be quarantined in a hotel.

https://www.phila.gov/2021-06-15-bounce-back-philly-offers-a-free-safe-place-for-covid-19-isolation-and-quarantine/

Some people would play their Covid card to get away from the kids who were home because teachers were at imminent threat of death from the plague rats children who could have contracted this novel/deadly disease.

Heck, if you hated your job enough, just find another employee who was on the testing bandwagon and hang out with them, a surefire way to become one of the people who could stay home/safe during a false or questionable positive. Although, then you have to deal with their pathological mindset of OCD testing.

Or, you could collect fruit and other manner of produce as it could test positive as well.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tanzania-idUSKBN22G295/

Once you are cleared about 10 days, you would go back to work, and could conceivably again, associate with someone who became positive and get right back on the Quarantine Carousel. There was a reporter who went into quarantine four times in three months due to their association with contagious individuals. I knew two people where one tested positive after going out to a bar after work, and so both were quarantined from work due to the whole quarantine/contact tracing nonsense.

Do not past go, do not collect $200.00.

This has a profound effect on the populace. It is one of my theories as to why some, if not all, industries are suffering.

Second, is this just me or do others feel this?

I almost feel "shame" in buying these over-the-counter treatments because, according to the narrative and consequently those people who believe it, I am putting others in danger merely by being in others' presence. COVID, according to them, is a "novel, deadly disease" so if I pick up these symptom mitigations, am I not by proxy "carrying a concealed weapon?"

I was hospitalized twice in 2021 and 2023 (not Covid related), and can tell you that hospitals are suffering from staffing issues, at least in the few hospitals I have visited. I heard it from a number of nurses. They said that just about any day, you could count on about a third of them being "out." The whole "avoiding infection." Meanwhile, the health care official in charge of meal distribution was there pretty much every day, along with the person who cleaned the room on a daily basis.

Nursing is a high-pressure situation as it is. Nurses are basically the doctors ‘rest of the body.” And it’s become more specialized than that. There are the techs that come in and take vitals, and then there are the nurses…nurses who actually address and interact with you. And many of them were missing. Some to burnout no doubt, but others due to the quarantine carousel.

The whole idea of infection avoidance has had a sad sea-change effect on Americans and any countries that adopted these draconian measures, who at one time were "can-do." If reality presented challenges, they rose up to meet those challenges. This is one of the sad legacies of pathologizing the normal. When normal becomes pathological, then pathological becomes normal.

Can do becomes “can avoid.”

And there is no greater illustration of that than how our relationship to sickness has changed since 2020. I remember (Before 2020) many times I showed up to work still with a residual cold. And it was considered good to do this because chances are, everyone was going to get sick and if you stayed out of work, you were going to let the team down and get behind. And it was decided that the burden or nuisance of a cold at work was far better than lost productivity.

Now under the performative notion of “caring more about your employees health than their role in their job, we have what we have now. And it is performative, and I don’t think it is sustainable.

The problem of the avoidance idea, coupled with a “zero tolerance” methodology of thinking is that it will force an inevitability of people staying home until completely symptom-free. Because, merely with some form of contact tracing, you can eliminate a third of your staff easily. Because of the fear and panic propaganda, merely showing any symptom could spell certain doom if you are selfish enough to show up and inflict your symptoms on another.

But it makes no sense. Because we know exposure does not mean infection.

And infection does not mean bad outcomes.

If a sickness was destructive in the way that the above two things occurred consistently, then I would be for these ridiculous restrictions and policies regarding sickness. But they don’t, and so there needs to be serious pushback.

I would make it clear up front. Being employed at this place of business means there will be people with colds, flus, allergies, and all sorts of inevitable maladies that come as part of interacting with humanity, and if you can’t handle it, seek employment elsewhere. A sick body is not an indicator of overall malaise or chronic condition.

Remember when we made fun of those who added drama in the face of very low drama events in their lives?

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Get Down With The Sickness

The other day, I came across a post on X that did the false equivalency of comparing peanut allergies to vaccination.

One of my biggest problems with memes is that they very often are strawman reframes of arguments, or they compare something severe with something mild to min-max the minimalist/maximalist effects of a false equivalency argument until it is, as another person on X put it, comparing apples to airplanes.

Ironic twist: What if it turned out that vaccination was one of the contributing factors to developing food allergies? One of the things that made me especially think about this was the AI response that stated it definitely was not a contributing factor in developing food allergies.

(I am being a little disingenuous here, there is information out there to that effect)

I once again digress.

My response: They should be allowed to bring peanut butter back into school.

My notifications on that tweet…was well, legendary, in terms of the likes and dislikes and reach. It also turns out that my old argument on the mandated accommodation of the many for the sake of the few analogy came back to haunt me.

Digression Disco:

Back in 2020 when the panicdemic™ began, it was then (as it still is now) all about the vulnerable, and I think at that point the death rate for Covid was around .2% according to the CDC. All these restrictions and regulations were for the sake of the vulnerable. And my analogy was two-pronged.

So wait, you shut down businesses, closed schools, and then hamstrung them all for the sake of a few? This would be like shutting down Thai restaurants for people with peanut allergies, or shutting down all fast food restaurants until they could accommodate 500 lb. people.

I thought these were fairly good arguments back in 2020 and still today about the ridiculousness of restricting the many for the sake of the few. And it was a way of pushing back against “your selfish if you don’t mask or take the experimental injection.” My response was,” Which is more selfish. To refuse to mask for potentially a few people who may die of a disease I don’t have, or to demand that everyone must mask to prevent a few people from potentially dying?”

Never got a good answer to that one. Instead, they keep hammering away that because children, very rarely, have at times a bad outcome, this means that all society should adapt to accommodate them.

Which also causes me to question: who do you think this meme was made for? For me, those who want to ban peanuts in school are the same people who want everyone to get vaccinated.

But I really stepped in it about peanut allergies. It was like poking a hornets nest.

The same arguments about mask wearing are the same arguments I get about “no peanuts.”

“It’s an easy thing to fix/do.”

” You can eat peanuts at home.”

”You can make other choices.”

My response: So can kids with peanut allergies. They can choose to stay home, sit at another table. Or here’s an idea…ask for their friends and classmates not to have peanuts. THAT is an easy fix. My point is that all these restrictions are being enacted and forced.

I also think in cases where children are threatening other children with peanuts should be something that is taken quite seriously. Kids will do stupid things. I know, because I was one of those kids.

So, for kids who threaten those with allergies with throwing, touching, or exposing them to peanut butter, there should be a serious response to it.

But peanuts shouldn’t be banned, any more than bicycle axles should be banned.

And in the end, banning it doesn’t do anything. In the end, 41% of kids with peanut allergies will come in contact with peanuts. In addition to foods themselves, there is also the issue of cross-contamination. This is probably why on the ingredients list of so many things available, there is “this product may contain peanuts and other allergenic ingredients”

(This gives me a great t-shirt idea…)

I’m called callous, uncompassionate, a dick, a jerk, an asshole. I did get one compliment in that they stated I sounded at one point to be a liberal, but also at the same time as a conservative. That’s a libertarian for you in a nutshell, pun intended.

At the top of the list of things I was called was inconsiderate. But I do consider. I am very much in the Star Trek state of mind when weighing the needs of the many over the needs of the few or the one. And in my life, voluntarily. I come down on both sides of the issue. I think that peanuts should be allowed in school. I also think I would not eat peanuts around a friend with peanut allergies.

But what if one day my mom sent along Pad Thai in my lunch box? I’d sit at another table and eat pad Thai, warn my friend about eating it, and he could assume whatever risk he wanted.

I am against mask wearing because they do not work, but if my dad had asked me to wear one, I would have done so. The difference is that the state rarely acts out of a sense of compassion. They usually act indirectly based on someone else’s sense of compassion and it’s wielded like a blunt object.

I get called out on moving the goalposts, on any number of things, and my response to all this could have been “this was a tweet ultimately about vaccination, not about peanut butter allergies, but the analogy does apply, just not in the way you might think.

I am ready to hear different, but I think many of us against mask and vaccine mandates, also think a lot of restrictions are ridiculous.

Eventually, the defense becomes one of minimizing the restriction "(you can eat peanuts anytime) vs. the outcome (a kid could die.) And yet not stating the truth, which is that out of all people, only about 200 a year die from peanut allergies.

And then finally, it usually gets to a point where they argue that if it saves one life, it is worth it.

Which brings me back into some comfortable territory.

I tell them that if this is their argument, then I have a list, and I guarantee that by the end of the list, I will have listed a shinola ton of things that will be restricted.

Which is one of the reasons I am very much a fan of people having the freedom to make their own decisions, and risk assessment, with the knowledge that there will be bad, incompetent, and sometimes malicious actors out there.

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It’s been five years+ since March of 2020 and all the craziness began.

Five Years!

And I think I should have parsed out a little about what this substack (which I started three years ago) is all about and why I started it. Did I want to get paid? Yes, there was some thought of monetization, but as I have proven, I will write regardless.

Another question is, what sets my “stack” apart?

First of all, you won’t find a lot of graphs, links, and charts here. I don’t run like that. I do read a lot of stacks that do have those things, as well as original sources, but I am more interested in “why this happened” rather than the facts about it. I am also interested in human behavior and have been studying it since birth. Most of us do to some degree.

I didn’t start Bare-Faced Plague-Spreader until 2022, following my amputation. Before then, although I did continue to read, search, and scour the internet for any dissenting sources on the fear and panic, such sources were elusive and became more elusive still as the panicdemic™ raged on. I was daily doing Google search upon DuckDuckGo search…

How does it stack up now?

Does anyone else think that Google searches are almost ridiculous now? Good luck finding anything of real quality. I think their manifesto of “Don’t be evil” must have changed in the intervening years. Isn’t “murky” not good? Isn’t “narrative status quo” not good? And one thing we learned about evil is that evil has a lot of rationalizations behind it. And apparently, “evil” depends upon the point of view. A pretty good indicator of “not good” is censoring any dissenting view.

Also, maybe Google created bat guano results to queries because they wanted more people relying on their “AI Overview,” where you can reframe a conversation just above the sponsored links. A good way to prebunk “misinformation” or stifle dissent is to offer an aggregate of all the approved references into a nice concise summary. How many will bother to do more research than that? Most of us feel the undertow of it, and for those of us who know, there are dissenting views out there, it is a massive source of frustration.

But—this is me going down a side narrative rabbit hole. Apologies.

The screenshot above is the “grok” summary as to what my stack is about.

So why didn’t I post anything in 2020?

First, I did reply to other people’s posts in 2020, I just didn’t “post” anything myself. But most if not all replies were dissenting against posts like “Wear The Damn Mask” and “Take the Damn Vaccine” and “Stay Home Stay Safe” all found on Facebook. You won’t find many of those posts because those who received such comments blocked/unfollowed me.

Aside from that, honestly, I didn’t think anything needed to be written. The “virus” wasn’t nearly as bad as they said it was. I said that back in February of that year in response to a friend in China, that, unlike China, there were adults in the room here. I’ve said this numerous times. I honestly had faith that “the ship would correct itself.”

I was completely wrong. But I also believed at times when the car engine light came on that it was a fluke and that my car too, would correct itself.

When the lockdowns occurred, and those first two years, I did a lot of studying, what those not indoctrinated into the narrative would call “doing my own research.”

Not sure when doing our own research became a bad thing. In elementary school, we did some variation of a research paper each year in grade school. We learned the Dewey Decimal System, we wrote things on notecards, and I remember doing papers on Kangaroos and Brazil, to name a few things. Back in those days, your school wanted you to look up and back things up, which, as luck would have it, was learning how to indoctrinate yourself by backing up anything you learned by approved library books and periodicals, and if you really wanted to dive a bit deeper, microfiche.

I did enjoy the novelty of this form of “research,” but found it almost silly in some ways. Writing things on notecards. The formulaic way of composing a research paper. And then the ordeal of writing it all by hand. I remember those papers were often littered with white out, or if I was lucky enough, I used one of those pens with erasable ink.

Before 2020, I was an avid reader of fiction; science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I couldn’t get enough of it. I even co-wrote a horror novel of my own, and you can catch that on Kindle down below. I would recommend not getting the print version, way too expensive. In fact, I think I have a .pdf version of it on hand. I might even provide a link to it online. Warning: it is rife with profanity and weirdness.

https://a.co/d/aKex39D

And then 2020 hit. And suddenly, my previous life of reading the latest Star Wars novel and playing copious amounts of video games was done. Suddenly, I was interested in things like viruses, pandemics, and government policy. I wonder why…

As a result of that time and other circumstances, this substack was born.

Doesn’t the title say it all? Maybe, to a degree, it might be a self-own. I certainly don’t think in reality I am a bare-faced plague spreader. Although the delivery driver who came out of the car wearing a mask outside might think so. 2025, and delivery drivers still sometimes wear masks.

So why my Substack?

I wanted a place I could weigh in not only on what is happening, but what will be happening. As of 2025, we could face another pandemic situation like we did before. I hope not, but it’s out there. It could happen at any point. There are certainly those who want it to happen. There are those who long for the “salad days” of mask mandates and lining up to get their shots and boosters.

They are the ones that will inform the government that they have an “anti-masker, science denier” in their midst.

Another thing I want to do is to try my best not to personally attack anyone. I do have a list of people I think should be held responsible for their part during the Covid mess that still exists because there are “ever maskers” and still experimental vaccine takers out there. And these people should be held to the highest accountability for it.

I know one thing, and that is no one can say concerning me, “he encouraged me to wear a mask and take the experimental vaccine.” I didn’t and still don’t. So whatever you can say about me, maybe some sins of omission, that is all that you can hold me responsible for.

—Well, and maybe you can hold me responsible for participating in lockdowns. My thinking at the time was that those making the policies would realize that “two weeks to stop the spread” was a ridiculous notion, and that it wouldn’t work because there was nothing TO work. I was also naive to think that the whole “Two Weeks To Stop The Spread” was a truth and not a form of selling known as the “foot in the door technique.”

I was pretty isolated during the Lockdowns. I got my food delivered, I went out twice a week to take out the trash, usually at night after everyone else was gone to bed. I socialized online from time to time, but most of what I did was, again, research.

If this had been going on at some other time in history, most of us would have laughed at the health regulations and told whoever penned them to pound sand. Because, unlike any other time in history, we had access 24/7 to up-to-the-minute propaganda updates.

Here’s an errant thought concerning Trump: maybe it took someone who wasn’t part of the Washington elite to convince him to enact executive orders. Because he was not so firmly ensconced in the narrative…he would not see the propaganda for what it is. Recently, I saw a video that got pretty crazy in places, but the person being interviewed as in government, and she said what was going on in government was quite a bit different than the Sunday shows with political talking heads. I do believe that to be true.

Before 2020, the reason why I wasn’t writing about vaccines, masks was that I wasn’t forced, coerced, or otherwise demanded to participate in medical theater. Even the narratives of viruses and sickness told in fiction never spoke to “lockdowns, vaccines, and masking,” but somehow these became something we all were more than a little familiar with in 2020.

I don’t want it to happen again. That they are currently trying to make it happen again is almost without a doubt happening. They would love for Bird flu, measles, the next Covid, Disease X, Monkey Pox, or some variation of it to become front and center in our lives. Anyone who fights against the narrative will be called a conspiracy theorist, science denialist, virus denialist, disease denialist, be painted as calloused and privileged, etc.

Name-calling is effective, but when grown adults act like children, it loses its luster. Ironically, Name-calling is childish behavior.

Some of us have faced a crossroads five years into this mess, and it still is a mess. Nothing has been undone that led to us all being corralled and led toward whatever restrictions and regulations we endured. And the same arguments about Covid that still exist in the social media sphere often reappear at any new pronouncement of the new administration.

And I’m not buying it. Measles is a mild disease that will occasionally be associated with bad outcomes. No reason to get a vaccine. And it is always about the vaccines. It’s always pathologizing normal behavior and also giving you a remedy to it that doesn’t necessarily work. You’re not going to see these same people burning calories about car accidents, childhood accidents, and heart disease.

Human behavior is evergreen. And thinking about it will be a topic of endless fascination.

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If there had been no propaganda in March of 2020, would you have known a “pandemic” occurred?

If there weren’t PSA’s, Athletic events being canceled, concerts and tours interrupted, schools closed, restaurants shuttered, businesses either shut down or gone to strictly remote, billboards, news breaks, breaking news, social media saturation? Would you have known there was a “pandemic?”

How many did you personally know who got sick, had a bad outcome from “Covid-19” in 2020? Were they healthy individuals until “Covid” happened? Or were they people already with some health complications, chronic conditions, on a number of medications, or those who were already over the standard 77 years of age?

I knew of two people in 2020 who allegedly died of “Covid.” Both over or around 77 years of age. Both had health problems. One was a guy who had bad COPD, sometimes he couldn’t even finish a karaoke song, no breath left, and that was before “Covid.” The other guy had issues as well, didn’t know him well enough to know what they were…but it ended badly for him as well.

Without Covid, would they have died anyhow in that same period of time?

I don’t know, but I err on the side of “yes.” Or if “no” was that no based on the disease, or the hype around the disease?

I did know a third guy who died as well last year, and friends assert it was Covid, but he had an underlying heart condition he had had for many years. Seems to me that Covid gets a lot of blame, where there was plenty of blame to go around before 2020.

Even now, those who have friends and family who sound coughy and raspy on the phone still think, regardless of test results, that the person has Covid. Before 2020, they had a cold or the flu, end of story, pass the potatoes.

Show me a “novel deadly virus” that is dangerous in and of itself. I see a positive test that was “right place/right time.” As if the notion of “they could have lived indefinitely, if not for Covid.

I know, I sound a little “Steve Kirsch” here, but I am not going to start a poll. I believe I already know the answer, or part of the spectrum of answers I would get.

Propaganda, as the definition suggests, is of an especially biased or misleading nature used to publicize or “prop up” a particular cause or point of view. We’ve seen examples of it in the past, like “the war on drugs,” for instance, as well as “secondhand smoke,” which used the leverage of “secondhand smoke harms others, therefore smoking should be banned from public places. I disagree with this, by the way. Despite the annoyance of smoking, I still think businesses have the right to allow it.

But people want what they want. They want to be able to go wherever they want, and they want others to adhere to their preferences. Hence why the talks of Covid lead to talks of accommodation.

We also know about propping up and hyping the next thing. So any science fiction movie that came out after 1977 that had any solid money behind it was hyped The Next Star Wars. The Fifth Element, Stargate, and Independence Day were all touted to be “The Next Star Wars.” None of those movies were.

Even subsequent Star Wars movies after the original three could not quite live up to the original movie series. But we know, even as we recognize that there won’t be a next Star Wars, that we do want to relive that elusive experience.

El Gato Malo talked about Propaganda in his 2021 article “shame ending variants".

bad cattitude

shame evading variants

if we’ve learned one thing over the course of the last year, it’s that almost no one really reads the data. no one reads the studies, assesses the methodology, or checks the math. just about nobody…

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5 years ago · 64 likes · 28 comments · el gato malo

At one point in his article, Gato states/quotes that propaganda is the pretext for allegiance. While I was poised to disagree, instead I ask “allegiance” to what? The first answer is “allegiance to political party,” and while a good many of those who believe in Covid and the restrictions are part and parcel of the left, I don’t think that is what “allegiance” is meant.

It’s a bit more fundamental than that.

The propaganda is an “allegiance” to an ideology. And now I find myself doing a deeper dive. I think it is an allegiance either to “constrained” vs “unconstrained” views of humanity.

Constrained means that humanity has inherent flaws, and that the different institutions and civilizations are structured keeping that in mind. Hence, the reason why our Constitution was set up in such a way is to limit the powers of the three branches of government. Think of constrained as knowing that humanity is not inherently good, and if you want to go the more ambiguous route, just embrace “Ebony and Ivory” as the anthem of the constrained.

I have very real doubts that humanity can cause long-lasting, pervasive disaster to the Earth. This isn’t to say we should dump toxic chemicals into the ocean, or that we could nuke ourselves into annihilation. But the problem isn’t an Earth problem, but rather a humanity problem. We could start dumping chemicals into the ocean and seas and do a good job at making ourselves sick and dead, but the Earth will be fine. Couple thousand years, and you won’t even know we were here.

Sure we could argue that it would also kill species of fish and other denizens of the deep, or make the earth relatively lifeless from a nuclear attack, but they would be supplanted. I doubt that we could even make the ocean a sterile lifeless place with all our ingenuity and knowledge.

The unconstrained vision of humanity is that humanity is malleable, and they are like a tabula rasa, and you can “write” perfection into them. Therefore, there is always a human answer, as we are not limited by our own flaws and limitations. Hence, we can be both the cause and the solution of COVID-19, Climate Change, and even the limitations of our own genetics.

Sorry but no. How well do you think we could have thrived in an earlier incarnation of earth, which was quite a bit hotter and more unstable in its “climate.” Or hey, let’s terraform Mercury and see how well that goes.

I think that a lot of people, both on the left and right, believe in an unconstrained view of humanity. That there are no limitations in what we can do. We can solve homelessness, climate change, disease, hunger, suffering, everything that plagues humanity with the right people onboard. We believe this even as we know at the same time that socialism or communism, no matter who tries it, will end in disaster. Well, at least some of us know. It’s far more likely that we go “Gulag Archipelago” than we upgrade into a Utopia.

Colds/Flus have been part of our lives since time out of mind. Most people will survive them, some will die, usually those who are already more on their way out than in. An unconstrained vision will not change them. The unconstrianed still maintain “if only enough people vaxxed or masked, Covid would be gone. If only we all collectively avoided illness, we could eliminate it. And as Ford Prefect said in Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy the key to flying is missing the ground.

More fundamentally, everyone dies.

I believe that Keith Richards has been dead for decades, but because he has avoided listening to anyone who declares him dead, he still persists.

Anytime I hear the argument about “needless deaths,” I zoom out and ask “What is a needful death?” And it’s really a strawman argument about death and dying. To acknowledge that death and dying is a natural part of life is akin to affirming that we would want as many people to die as possible? And yet, those well marinated in Covid propaganda seem to think that about those of us who deign to think that living life freely and without mask and going experimental injection free are walking around like serial killers waiting to strike.

Disease is gonna disease.

And there is a reason for it. It’s not as easy as eliminating whatever external foes or bigaboos there are out there. I think, for instance, that a good deal of the perceived and real longevity of bad symptoms that supposedly arose due to Covid was due to the Covid propaganda and measures surrounding it. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want a “pandemic” then globally scare the shit out of society.

I imagine if you ran a test, you would find that those under stress are the ones who are more prone to problems. This is a rich man-poor man type of thing. Poor people worry and stress out just to survive. Rich people worry and stress out that they could lose a lot due to whatever intervention they encounter. Their choices have more gravity to them as they know, make the wrong decision, and millions of dollars could evaporate.

I maintain that if only people stopped getting false tests, the pandemic would be gone. And if you lived on a desert island, or a remote place where propaganda didn’t reach, there was no pandemic. This, of course, is one of Koch’s postulates, which I think could be adapted to propaganda as well as microorganisms. Did the pandemic only exist in places of saturated propaganda? I don’t even know how you would measure such a thing.

If we could poke into the “many other worlds” that exist and see what happened in a world that didn’t pull the trigger on their simulation pandemic exercise and make it reality, I wonder what we would see. My supposition is fewer deaths in 2020 due to horrible hospital protocols. Then again, maybe not. Before Covid, at least half of at least the US was overstressed by the “Orange Man Fascist” propaganda. So in reality, what we would need is a general, less “fear and panic” based media.

Less propaganda, less problems.

Also, those who turned off the TV, radio, as well as any other website that delivered dire warnings, are doing far better than those who did not. I think Sweden and a few other places, at least policy-wise, are good examples of what we see from places that did not go “full Covid lockdown” as a reaction to all the propaganda.

That’s really what I am talking about; my focus here is more an exercise in determining reality vs. propaganda. Those who went to see The Fifth Element in the theater knew it wasn’t the next Star Wars. There was no Sixth and Seventh Element. And those who questioned the statistics and daily death rates and saw the reality around them were treated to something quite different than the global extinction event known as “Covid.”

There will of course be the usual round of questions to counter this idea of “narrative” being “decimating.”

People who argue for “traffic safety,” for instance, as an analogy to Covid recommendations. That, like traffic laws, we should have complied with the Covid rules of masking, social distancing, quarantining, and vaccinating.

They would maintain that, similar to COVID, traffic laws too, are “fake.” Yet they know full well that running a red light can have dire consequences. We have all experienced seeing totaled cars and ambulances, no one needs to tell us the devastating complications that can occur due to high-speed collisions, many of which are due to negligent driving and failing to employ “defensive driving” strategies, including adherence to traffic signals.

COVID on the other hand, had none of the dire consequences. Sure, there were the Chinese videos that, upon reflection, are laughable. But where are the American analog videos that show people passing out due to COVID on the street? Query this on Google, and the only answers that show up is the anti-vaxxer hit pieces on athletes and talking heads fainting or dying suddenly on TV ex pos vaxxo.

Propaganda is meant to prop up things that are not.

Hence why there was so much propaganda. And that propaganda includes policy to rationalize other policy. Those who were behind all this, knew there had to be “visible” versions of it or it wouldn’t wash. So masking was employed. Business and school closures were employed. You went to the store, there was signage, stickers, and announcements over the PA. But is that evidence of a “deadly virus,” but measures employed to “stop or slow down” a “deadly virus?”

If anyone thinks that Covid Propaganda is limited in its effectiveness, look no further than X in 2025. There are still indicators and will for the indefinite future be “Ever Maskers”

I even understand this, because in reality, what has fundamentally changed since 2020, other than the mass media/government/public health apparatus giving us 24/7 propaganda on Covid? Nothing. Colds and flus (now Covid) still happen, and among those people who get sick, there will be a percentage of people who will have more long-lasting effects.

This is not different than what happened before, only now much more attention is paid. Before 2020, we knew that some had bad outcomes from sickness. That "some people would never bounce back, never make it to 100%.

Propaganda. I speak out against it daily.

At times, I wish we could employ “anti-COVID propaganda,” but for those of us who recognize such power, we are not in favor in employing the same methods for countering it. Fear can capture a society in minutes, but to bring others back to reason, it takes one person at a time, with the knowledge that they are free to still be under the thrall of the narratives that drove them to the current indoctrination.

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30 million people?

Children?

In the neighborhood of make-believe, maybe. The number gets larger and larger all the time. In twenty years from now, if those ensconced in the narrative have their way, Covid will be the next Spanish flu (they do believe that Covid continues) And if we are censored, there will be a paradoxical bit of information on what it was like to live “during Covid.” Paradoxical in that, people may well say that it was horrible and decimating, but then pin them down on their own personal pain, and they will either hyperbolize or admit that “for them” it was far less of a nightmare than it was throughout the world.

For instance, in my case, I knew of two who allegedly died “of Covid.” Yet both were over 70 and both had pre-existing health problems. So them dying “of Covid” out of the blue just isn’t true.

The implication in this post by The Vertlartnic was that children were harmed by Covid over the last five years. In the first two years of Covid, the child mortality rate for COVID was less than the amount of one year of children dying of the Cold/flu. So, where were all the PSA”s, masking, mandates, and other messaging regarding the common cold before 2020? If it is all about the children, where is the outrage over childhood accidents, which actually is the primary cause of child death and injury?

To be sure, children were harmed during COVID-19. They were forced to mask, stay home, and adhere to the idiocy of the restrictions. They were psychologically damaged in so many ways we cannot fathom. Behind in school, behind in socialization, not to mention the demoralizing policy that we all must put on hold the milestones of childhood for a cold. Remember learning to read and sound out words back in grade school? Imagine trying to read a teacher’s lips, the way to make the word sound without seeing their mouths?

The real sad danger of all of this is making children thinking this is normal. For them, they have no precedent. I wonder if any has asked a question like “so where were all the other times everyone had to mask, lockdown, and be mandated to get a vaccine?

So the Ironic Response is that it’s normal for children to get sick as children. Parents hate it, fear for the worst, and their first child is the one who usually gets the brunt of it.

The first questionable assertion is that the repeat infections are COVID-19. As what determined by a PCR test? We are talking hundreds of children dead, and I wonder if these were children who were already sick. Show me a bunch of healthy children that suddenly were struck down by COVID, and you have my attention. But they didn’t, and they don’t and they obfuscate and won’t answer the question, which raises more questions. But of course, the answer to the “why lie and fear monger about children?

If you have adults fear for their children, they will do almost anything to prevent that fear from being realized, no matter how remote such a worst-case scenario is.

So it makes me think many of the rationalizations being run are simply in support of a sunk cost logical fallacy that got us into this to begin with. The people doing simulations and tabletop “pandemic” games had all these tools due to legal policy in their arsenal, and they wanted to give them a chance. So they did. And the one true way to get the masses onboard is to come at them through their children.

Reinfections Regardless Of Origins.

This is playing right into the false dichotomy of the origin story of COVID-19.

First, again, the strawman argument that those of us who said things like “determine your own risk reward ratio and act accordingly.” The other side’s characterization of this is “getting infected as much as possible.” Which makes no sense because this was the policy before 2020. How is going and living a normal life “catching Covid a bunch of times?” And those that would almost compare going out into the world and interacting as normal as an almost criminal offense, do not respond well when you remind them that if this were so, then we should all be convicted for acting in such a way before 2020.

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A summarization of this is to pathologize normal, and to normalize pathology. So, going out and hanging with friends at a restaurant is tempting reinfection, and staying home and getting your groceries delivered is what a normal, upstanding citizen would do.

But there is one element of truth here. If Covid was as dangerous as they said it was, then soft lockdowns were far from enough. And this is why it is such a false dichotomy, because both “natural” and unnatural” neither question “novel deadly virus.”

So here is the ironic response.

There were videos and such indicating that it wasn’t as dangerous as they said it was, as well as indicators long before a pandemic was called and lockdown policy was issued. But these dissenting videos and other materials were ignored/taken down/censored. Again, a large new arsenal of policy tools, people wanted to use them. So they did.

They also wanted to try out the new mRNA technology on the masses and legal heaven and earth had been moved to do so. A snarl of obsolete tech wires of legal rulings which made a domino effect of the ability to make it so taking an experimental injection was no longer experimental because they redefined terms, and relabelled things like “dissent” as “vaccine hesitancy.” One week, I should write down a list of all the “horse puckey” Covid words, mantras, and mottos we were subjected to which were “medically woke language.”

Happy Monday.

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