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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 102
As we near the end of the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselessness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:
1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, the floor is open for discussion.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
In the case of my wife and myself, we were massively fortunate to both be recent retirees, me in February 2019 and my wife in February 2020. Both of us being moderately comfortable in our retirement income situation, due in large part not to big investments or lots of savings but rather to having implemented JMG’s powerful suggestion to “Collapse Now And Avoid The Rush” several years prior, we could look at the seemingly-global deranged Coof behavior & policies and mostly just say “meh.” Slipping through the cracks!
Reviewing my photo archive, I can see how my wife and I did numerous workarounds which nourished our sanity and our fundamental humanity. We live in California, which was one of the more-extreme locations in the USA for Coof-Craziness, but of course places like Canada and New Zealand made California look like a return to the laid-back “Hey, Wow man” era of the 1960s.
Being retired, I could view the world through the panicked glances of the checkers at the supermarket, looking at frantic customers buying huge stacks of toilet paper and pre-assembled hamburgers. It was really quite heart-wrenching. I was SO glad I no longer had to work!
My wife and I quickly innovated our way into being out-and-about through using our electric bikes and camping equipment to go on numerous jaunts to parks and school yards, picnicing. We did succumb to the initial panic of wiping down purchased food with cleaning wipes, but when it quickly became obvious the Coof didn’t spread that way we chilled on doing that.
Here’s our first “exercise outing” in March of 2020 (technically, we were under a “stay at home” lockdown but there were exemptions for “exercise”):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/4FK8juhiSzYBCgtB9
I have a background oh-so-many-years-ago in biology, so I was following along the numerous discussions about Coof and later the developments & then release of the Gene Therapy. The mainstream narrative made me scratch and shake my head in dismay many times. But the numerous reasoned discussions here in Archdruid Land kept me on a reasonably even keel.
One of my brother’s daughters was getting married in mid-2020, so we drove to Wyoming to attend. Supposedly a stay-at-home order in Cali then, but… bah. During that trip, we noticed the very powerful class divide that Coof accentuated: walk into a high-end mountaineering store and you’d be jumped upon by staff shrilly insisting on tight-fitting masks and liberal dousing of hands in alcohol gel, but walk across the street to a working-class jewelry store and the owner would shrug and say “wear a mask if it makes you feel comfortable, doesn’t bother me either way.” Walking along the trails at Bryce Canyon we noticed that those who were wearing masks were stepping out of Teslas or high-end Audis wearing sweatshirts with Ivy League logos.
We went camping in Lassen National Park with some friends in August of 2020. The mix of hikers and campers was something to behold. Saw and talked to several cheery families where the husband sported a “MAGA” hat or equivalent, all maskless and quite engaging, which dramatically contrasted to the other masked families out on trails GLARING at all & sundry with the obvious message that they viewed every human being as extremely-dangerous mobile biological contaminators which should be rounded up and exterminated (the trails had little signs suggesting mask wearing; masks were required in all park buildings.) Seemed kind of ridiculous to be fearing an airborne respiratory virus infection on breezy sunlit days outdoors!
To vaxx or not to vaxx was not really an issue for us; I could see that both of us being free of any co-morbidities other than being in our 60s were well down on the scale of “oooh, scary, gonna die” from the 🦠.
The ridiculousness of having to tote thirty pages of mostly French-language filled-out forms and reports when we visited my wife’s mother in France in 2021 (she, in her 90s, was recovering from Coof, which allowed us to get a written statement from her physician that, along with my wife’s French passport, allowed us to fly there) and then to have NO ONE look at all the forms except the gate agent in Burbank: well, priceless. And flying trans-Atlantic on a 300-passenger airplane with only about 25 passengers aboard (several were rejected at the boarding area in DFW) was quite a new experience, along with landing at De Gaulle airport to notice we were the only plane moving on the entire airfield at 8 in the morning!
If you could somehow wrangle the system, as we did, and were able to travel internationally, US citizens still needed to get tested to return to the USA. On our trip to England and France in 2022, my wife got a semi-frantic email from the local village pharmacy: she tested positive! But it was a very weak positive, and for some unknown reason they decided it’d be OK if she took a second test. That one came up NEGATIF so we were good to go. We wended back home, and she was as usual kinda jet-lagged and tired, but perhaps more so than prior journeys. On a whim, popped out an antigen test and tested her: POSITIVE! She was pretty sick for a couple of weeks, with an illness unlike any she’d had before, but I stayed un-ill and felt (& tested) fine. Huh, perhaps I’d had the Coof and had been asymptomatic, though there were the couple of days of vertigo I had when we were visiting New Orleans in March 2020. Hmmm.
I finally got Coofed in late November of 2022, after attending a Thanksgiving gathering. Definitely out of action for a week, and slow recovery for another week or so, but nothing remotely life-threatening. And my wife stayed healthy!
Many years prior, I’d been on a high-pressure spaceflight project where they encouraged all team members to get a flu shot at the work infirmary. That season I got sick three times, very uncharacteristic of me, and hauled around a sore arm for many months. My conclusion: these “vaccine” shots aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. I continued to donate blood regularly, so it wasn’t an aversion to being stabbed but rather an assesment that… something was off.
My wife had, even earlier, taken affront at the jab schedule imposed on her son. Her investigations exposed her to writings where, even decades ago, reasonable people were starting to question the whole obsession of the vaxx mania.
Our spiritual practices were and are complimentary to non-conformism, thus with the independence of being retired we were both comfortable in staying jab-free. We give thanks to our respective allies for keeping us equanimous.
Aspies like myself have a bit of an aversion to lying (well, perhaps an incapability of being successful at lying), but a great workaround in that case is that Aspies are oftentimes very literal, so the signs saying “no admittance without vaccination” or “masks must be worn if you’re not vaccinated” were easy to waltz by mask-free: why yes, I have been vaccinated! (And it’s none of your business precisely which vaccine I’m referring to…) 😃
During the whole sad tedious dreary Coof interval, I did develop a new hobby: surreptitiously removing Coof signs. It’s quite amazing to me that you can (discreetely) lean over and peel a “six feet” sticker off the floor and no one will seemingly notice. Taking signs off front doors is also quite doable, again with discretion. Perhaps the same skill set as used by pickpockets?
Kudos to Danbashaw for initiating this thread, and many many thanks to JMG for providing this forum. Reading through the replies so far, I’m overwhelmed with the diversity and power of the testimonies.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
(Anonymous) 2023-07-24 07:39 pm (UTC)(link)So what is that-- TP hoarding and shortages? Not survival. Not necessity. Fear. Of what, exactly? It seems to crystallize, in a simple white roll (why is it white? why do we bleach something that we're going to clean up excrement with? why isn't it kraft brown, wouldn't that be cheaper and less polluting?), every modern fear-- fear of biology, fear of contamination, fear of poverty, fear of nature... one object that represents the weird excess of modern industrial civilization. Take it away, and there's so much that people would be forced to re-think... this is why the TP panic. If there's anything modern western people don't want to examine, it's their lifestyles-- excess, convenience, waste. Give me TP or give me death, right?
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
(Anonymous) 2023-07-20 02:17 am (UTC)(link)love the photo and THIS (above) made my night. :-) Thank you.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
(Anonymous) 2023-07-20 02:30 am (UTC)(link)