THIS & THAT XVI

           I don’t think I’ve ever seen a positive portrayal of Albanians in the movies or on TV.  Are they all gangsters and psychopaths?

 

*

 

          The end of traditional journalism didn’t really bother me all that much.  It has been some years since I believed what I read in newspapers or saw on TV news, but the end of journalistic standards has coincided with the growth of the internet.  This means it has been possible to find out the truth on-line, if you were willing to spend some time on the search.  You could actually read the speech and see what the guy said rather than believe what NBC told you he said.  You could find the published scientific paper and figure out if the NYT’s spin on it had any relation to the truth.  During the media’s COVID terror campaign, it has been possible to dig up the truth about lockdowns, masks, vaccines, testing and so on.  There is real data out there.  There are working virologists and epidemiologists who write papers and do podcasts.  You don’t really have to pay any attention to Fauci or Whoopie Goldberg or Snoopdog.

 

          But the censoring of information today, and the “cancel culture,” presents more of a problem.  Those who report facts that conflict with the woke narrative now are banned from social media sites and silenced in a variety of ways.  Those with dissenting views or those who try to publish inconvenient data are smeared as conspiracy freaks or white supremacists or any number of other slurs.  Regarding information about COVID, Professor Beda Stadler, retired Director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Bern, has gone so far as to warn against believing anyone who is currently employed in a medical faculty as a virologist or epidemiologist.  They are forced to toe the ideological line, or watch their research funds disappear and their careers stagnate.  We have seen this done for years to those scientists who question the prevailing views on climate change, but the extent of the de-platforming, and its brutal efficiency, has increased to the point that honest men of conscience often just bend their knee to it because they see no alternative.

 

          This makes it harder for someone like me to learn the truth, even though I’m willing to spend some time and effort in doing so.  I have two recent examples.

 

          It is almost impossible to find any reliable information about deaths and injuries caused by COVID vaccinations.  There is plenty of speculation, and there are many theories, and some of the theories may be nutty and some may be not-so-nutty, but factual reporting is not permitted.  (Or at least it is not being done.)

 

          Hank Aaron got vaccinated on January 6, in public, and he did it in part as a signal to other black people that vaccination was safe.  Nineteen days later, he was dead, and we still do not know why.

 

          We are told the vaccine had nothing to do with his death.  We are told nothing else.  If you want a medical opinion, or an autopsy, or some fact-based conclusion from somebody who examined him at the time, forget it.  The official story is that he did NOT die from the vaccine.  That’s all you need to know, and if you ask any more questions about this, it’s only because you are a Trump supporter or a QAnon loonie, or a Proud Boy, or something worse.

 

          The other issue about which it is impossible to find any real information is the cause of death of Brian Sicknick, the U.S. Capitol policeman who died a day after the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building in Washington.  It has been two-and-a-half months since he died, and nobody seems to care how it happened.  Originally, the media reported that some Trump yahoo hit him on the head with a fire extinguisher, but a week later that story was withdrawn.  (How do you even publish such a story unless there’s a fire-extinguisher-sized dent in the guy’s head and you have a photo of it?)  More recently, “they” seem to be floating a tale that a couple of Proud Boys hit him with some “bear spray,” (not entirely sure what that is), and this led to his death a day later.  Those Proud Boys have not been charged with homicide, however.

 

          I would like to think that Officer Sicknick was a hero and deserves our highest honors.  There is obviously something about the story that runs contrary to whatever acceptable narrative Democrats and the news media wish to present, however, so we are told nothing about what happened.  The result of this is to defame Sicknick by making it look like he did something seriously wrong, and that the circumstances of his death were not heroic, but disgraceful.  Otherwise, why not give us the truth?                   

 

*

 

          Whenever I am paying cash at a self-checkout machine, and I have no change in my pocket, the total is always something like $28.02.

 

*

 

          One of the biggest problems with the current authoritarian takeover of the American republic is that most people are not able to take it seriously.  They do not understand how evil and satanic our world can become, and how quickly it can happen.  (Hat tip: Naomi Wolf.)

 

*

 

          There are COVID “laws,” “mandates,” “guidelines,” “recommended practices,” and “restrictions.”  They differ from state to state, from city to city and from store to store.  They may be enforced by local police, federal law enforcement like the TSA, school administrators, private businesses and other entities, some of which may have statutory legal authority and some of which do not.

 

          The confusion this engenders is by design.  This is one way authoritarian governments destroy the rule of law, by blurring what “the law” is in such a way that the individual is never entirely sure whether his behavior may lead to arrest.  The path of least resistance, and least anxiety, is simply to do what you are told, no matter who tells you to do it.

 

*

 

          I have written about herd immunity before.  It is endlessly discussed by the public health bureaucrats and their media outlets, and it is used to justify their continued restrictions, vaccination programs, mask mandates, and so on.  When 40% of American have had the shot, will that mean we have “herd immunity?”  60%?  80%?  The issue is purely a red herring.

 

          We have known from the beginning that about 80% of us have a natural pre-existing immunity.  That was the lesson of the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship stranded in Yokohama in January of 2020, where only 19% of those aboard became infected, though everyone was exposed to the virus (and each other), for weeks.

 

          Studies of household transmission now give us the same range.  A review of 54 studies, published by the JAMA Network on December 14, 2020, reported that the “secondary attack rate” in households, among 77,758 people, was 16.6%.

 

*

 

          Some months ago, I wrote about spending a week in Rehoboth, Delaware, and the local customs regarding the mask mandate, distancing rules, and other restrictions.  Though the rules were very similar to those in Philly at the time, people’s attitudes were very different, and that was obvious from differences in public behavior.

 

          I recently returned from a long weekend in Las Vegas.  Both cities have mask mandates and distancing rules and capacity restrictions in public places and “guidelines” for disinfecting surfaces, but though the rules in Vegas are strikingly similar to those in Philadelphia, the behavior and the attitudes could not be more different.

 

          In Philly, my liberal hometown, there are lots of people who wear masks even when they’re not required to, and they will scold you if you do not wear one.  They believe in mask-wearing and they believe we should all be forced to wear masks by the police or other authorities because wearing a mask is virtuous.  By insisting on the practice, and the enforcement, they are telling us how virtuous they are.  The rights of other people mean nothing to them.  The individual circumstances of other people mean nothing to them.  The “science” of the effectiveness of masks means nothing to them because they have been told what to believe hundreds of times by other liberals on TV.  The question is settled.

 

          Capacity limits for restaurants and such are also strictly observed in Philadelphia.  No restaurant would dare seat more than 35% of their capacity because somebody would call the cops and have the place shut down.  Distancing rules here are also important to many.  Even in a crowded place like a supermarket or Target, people are constantly trying to avoid getting too close to each other.  Apologies are immediately offered if your six-foot bubble is inadvertently breached.

 

          The irony of Vegas is that while mask mandates, disinfectant wipe-downs and other measures are enforced much more rigorously by casinos and other businesses than they are in Philadelphia, it is immediately apparent that nobody really believes in it.  There is no virtue-signaling in Las Vegas because there is no virtue.  There, COVID restrictions are strictly about the cash.  In Las Vegas, everything is always about the Benjamins.

 

          If you sit at a bar or a blackjack table in Vegas, your mask must be properly in place at all times.  When you take a slug of beer, you may pull down your mask to do so but you must immediately replace it over your nose and mouth or you will be admonished by the dealer, bartender, or other employee.  If you are having a meal in a restaurant, the rules are somewhat more relaxed since eating is a continuous process, but when you are finished, the mask must be re-positioned or you will be spoken to.

 

          In addition, there are disinfectant sprays and towels everywhere.  When a new dealer appears at a gaming table, he or she will arrive with a damp towel and wipe the chips, the card shoe, the felt table, etc.  When a player leaves, a new player is not permitted to sit down until his chair and everything he will touch is swabbed.  This will not be done until the player arrives, however.  It is essential that the newcomer sees that his area is made “safe.”  The maniacal wiping and swiping is particularly laughable since we have known for months that the virus is transmitted through the air and you’re not going to catch it from a doorknob, but hey---the show must go on.

 

          This is the compromise sin makes with virtue in the neon city.  Mask rules are constantly enforced and every surface is wiped because these are relatively inexpensive measures to implement.  However, capacity limits and other rules that could actually interfere with the flow of cash are completely ignored wherever possible.  We went to a restaurant one night where the hostess could not give us a table because, she said, she was forced to observe the 35% capacity limits.  The place, however, was packed.  Every table was full and people were sitting shoulder to shoulder.  Later, on Fremont Street in the Downtown area, we had to fight through jostling, drunken crowds of mostly 20-somethings falling all over each other and rubbing against us.  Yet even there, there were security guys telling you to pull your mask up.

 

          Some years ago, I wrote that the thing I found most charming about Las Vegas was that, much like all of America a hundred years ago, everybody was looking to make a buck and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that.

 

          It’s still true.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki