359 Comments

I stopped paying attention to mainstream Covid news headlines, simply for the sake of my own psychic health. But I am seeing more and more fools wearing them. I despise these people. I truly do.

Expand full comment

I saw a guy driving in a car by himself with a mask on the other day. First time in years I’ve spotted that in the wild. My daughter just turned six last week. I asked her: “do you remember when a lot of people at daycare and in stores or restaurants wore masks on their faces?”

No. Thank God

Expand full comment

We see men on motorcycles not wearing helmets, but wearing masks. 🤦🏻

Expand full comment

Me too. Or students on those electronic skateboard things. Mask, but no helmet and in the street. Are they scared of air germs but not being crushed by a ton of metal?

Expand full comment

How about the people smoking and wear the mask under their chin lol?

Expand full comment

My favorite mask guy works in our local grocery store. One morning I was in his line and he had his mask pulled down while he sneezed and coughed. I asked him why he was still wearing one. He said, "I like wearing one." [evidence of some kind of addiction, I suspect]. But I pressed on. I asked if knew that within 20 minutes of wearing a mask he was growing colonies of yeast, bacteria, and mold; and that his CO2 levels were rising. I said that wearing a mask creates the perfect conditions for growing microbes: it's warm, moist, and dark. He said that his mask was helping him get fewer colds. I said, "It looks like you have a cold right now." And I left the store. Next time I saw him at his job, he wasn't wearing a mask. I like to emphasize the disgusting part of wearing a mask. I also enjoy staring at mask-wearers when I pass them and shake my head just a little.

Expand full comment

I noticed ages ago that all the "progressive" activist types--trannies, BLM, pudgy blue hairs, etc., etc.--LOVE their masks and that they often work in retail. If I see that the clerk at a supermarket checkout is wearing a mask, I switch lines.

Expand full comment

Excellent!

Yup I sometimes have a hard time not coughing when I pass those masks wearers in my grocer, especially when they’re wearing gloves, hats and sunglasses as well lol!

Expand full comment

Maybe we should fake-sneeze when we pass them. Just sayin'.

Expand full comment

Give in to your inner mischievous self. Channel your inner "Calvin & Hobbes". GO FOR IT.

Expand full comment

This! When I see a younger person wearing a mask, I shake my head in disgust, but I try to not do it in their face. The thing that I never understood about mask wearing and its apparent appeal was the absolute fact that masks are an almost perfect culturing place. Warm, dark, moist. Absolutely chock full of bacteria and whatever else you might breathe out and "save for later." Then again, when that group of housewives, in Texas I think, had their kids' masks analyzed for contaminants, and the results came back with all sorts of nasty stuff, my wife asked, "Isn't that indication that the masks are working?" She figured, somehow, that having all that crap, in a media, ON YOUR FACE, was indication that the mask was doing its job! The obvious ain't (apparently) that obvious!

Expand full comment

Same here. A woman working the check-out line wearing a mask, for several weeks in a row. One day, she had a coughing fit. Couldn't stop coughing and had hard time controlling herself. She could barely take care of the customers in line waiting to check out. Her eyes were all red and she looked miserable.

I haven't seen her since that day.

Expand full comment

"He said that his mask was helping him get fewer colds. I said, "It looks like you have a cold right now." "

Irony leans to the ironic side of things.

https://tenor.com/view/william-shatner-irony-ironic-airplane2-shatner-gif-11990618

Expand full comment

I just see them as invisible - my dad taught me that trick as a kid. Anyone I disliked I just didn’t see them. I taught my daughter the same thing in school. When she couldn’t punch them where and when they deserved, she pictured them gone. 😆

Expand full comment

My Mask-Vape Pen Demo, described elsewhere in this comments section, would seem to indicate that one not need even pull their mask down in order to smoke.

It'll go straight through the fabric.

Expand full comment

I like the video on youtube about the guys wearing various types of masks/respirators where they spray pepper spray in the tent to test their effectiveness.

Expand full comment

That's pretty brave. But also illustrates what sort of getup is really required to filter teeny tiny little aerosol particles.

It ain't that Harley Davidson bandana you picked up at Royal Farms with your coffee and Otterbein's Chocolate Chip cookies on the way to the office.

Expand full comment

Something something 'Cost-Benefit Analyses'

Expand full comment

I want them to put a mask on me when I'm dead and in my casket. /s

Expand full comment

"It would've been worse if he hadn't been vaxxed."

Expand full comment

might make you wake up LOL

Expand full comment

Ya they think they’re bad ass - so far from that 🤦‍♀️

Expand full comment

Lol! That is a priceless Meme.

Expand full comment
founding

You are very lucky

Because many children are sitting ducks for tyrants because nobody cares to explain to them that none of these abnormal interventions worked and were dangerously WRONG. Yet they were wielded with a heavy hand , coast to coast, by little tyrants, for no other purpose than for them to rule their fiefdoms with an iron fist, immorally robbing children of the gift of childhood for 2 years.

And leaving them to grow up believing the abnormal is normal. They' have crate trained and "normalized" children to all the vileness of blind obedience to conformity with machinations of deceit and outright LIES.

They have forced children to live a lie, using moral trickboxes, to believe they have done "good".

Seems like these conditions leave a distinct possibility of a repeat?

Expand full comment

Certainly seems as though that's the intention. We're not letting it happen again.

Expand full comment

They pathologized normal, and the place to really do it is with the children. Compliance among adults was questionable, but get the children to do it. Well, it's all that they've ever known.

Expand full comment
founding

Exactly. Nailed it

Expand full comment

Makes me wonder what else they have done to us that we consider normal.

Expand full comment

Payroll taxes and compulsory attendance

Expand full comment

Yes! School closures should have been an indicator, I think they will be. I think some valuable things were lost due to school closures, mostly social and mental, but the narrative is that there was a lot of "lost learning" during Covid. Upon what metric are they measuring "lost learning?"

Expand full comment

Our mailman drives around in his mail truck with one on!

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

I started doing a demo a couple months ago after I got Teh CoViD (super mild this time compared to the first time, which was also distinctly not-awful) and 'had to wear a mask' for a few days returning to work - after I was surely not illin.

I bought a $25 mint vape pen and have a delightfully scarlet KN95 mask that the MIL picked up somewhere last year. When I'm somewhere where I might expect to see more masks - like Wegman's, a Mid-Atlantic-ish Diet Whole Foods - I don the mask in the parking lot, suck in a big ol' puff of Minty Fresh Vapor THROUGH THE MASK then exhale. And the cloud comes out literally everywhere: sides, top under the eyes (if your glasses fog when you wear a mask then you already know masks are useless), and literally THROUGH THE MASK. Like a big puffy cumulus cloud.

Then I say I lean into some Soccer Mama with two young future Hitler Youth in tow and let out a, "Dag, honey - did you see that? Masks are freaking useless!"

Then I pay for my overpriced but fresh and still plentiful *sacrifices KFC 3-piece Meal to the Supply Chain Gods* for now vittles.

Expand full comment

😂😂😂Inspired!!!

Expand full comment

Genius! We need thousands to adopt your action!

Expand full comment

It's really sad that people are still that scared.

Expand full comment

Having sympathy for them has gotten us nowhere though.

Expand full comment

Agreed. As Gato said: “your pathology is your problem, stop making it mine.”

My new mantra

Expand full comment

He needs shirts. I would buy one.

Expand full comment

The demand to accommodate and play medical theater is ridiculous. But it does need to be called out as theater.

Expand full comment

It's why I will purposefully not use the correct pronouns with people who have pronouns in their profile.

Expand full comment

Empathy for them is what drives me to go to places and disagree with them.

Expand full comment

I talk to them all the time—I live in Hyde Park, Chicago, for Christ's sake 😡—but I don't like them. Like I said, you're a better man than I am. I'm good at pretending. These substack comments sections are a godsend for me. 👍

Expand full comment

"It's really sad that people are still that scared."

As well as that stupid.

Expand full comment

It's not two different problems, but one problem of cause and effect. It's the fear that makes people stupid.

Expand full comment

I wish that were true, but it isn't. There are too many day-to-day examples of just how stupid many people are when authority figures lie to them, which is most of the time, and yet they still believe them. It seems that skepticism is in short supply.

Expand full comment

See also Bonhoeffer on "being made stupid."

Expand full comment

Also facts lol

Expand full comment

That’s hilarious.

Expand full comment

I saw that alot here in SF. Solo workers and delivery drivers masked up.

Expand full comment

2 fools in the local grocery store still wear them. If more morons wear them I will go to the store in next town over, to avoid either being disgusted, or laughing in their faces. One was standing outside smoking last time I went. Then put mask back on to go in.

Expand full comment

They are moron markers. At this point these folks are either dullards, fully traumatized by the fear porn or have a severe case of Münchausen Syndrome or maybe a nasty elixir of all of the above.

Expand full comment

I live in a very traditional conservative area of the south. It's essentially mask-free but every now and then I will see a lone ranger sporting a mask.

This past Saturday my wife and I were in a local Indian place when a young woman walked in and made a ceremony out of pulling a black mask over her face as she walked in. The whole pantomime was fraught with moral superiority.

No one said anything but a few people simply rolled their eyes. You have to wonder what is going through the minds of these people.

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

As Señor Gato noted here previously, the best response is that we simply Laugh at These People.

I suggest that we also Point at Them while we laugh.

I think it's good advice.

Expand full comment

Great advice, but might cost you your life, lol! The cult runs deep.

Expand full comment

Meh. It might be worth a good last laugh.

Expand full comment

My thoughts exactly. I honestly cannot keep a straight face with the Covidians any longer..

Expand full comment

On a flight from FL to NY the woman next to me wore a mask until she had three cocktails. Then she never put it back on. What was the point???🙄

Expand full comment

Alcohol kills germs!😉

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

You beat me to my reply! 🤣😊

Expand full comment

Maybe a few more and she wouldn't have noticed whether she was wearing clothes?

Expand full comment

This is exactly why the bars were closed..but if you served food it could remain open. Alcohol causes impaired thinking, also it numbs your ability to be perpetually afraid.

Expand full comment

The mask protected her until the alcohol protected her 🤣

Expand full comment

Typically, I just lean toward my wife and say, "I see stupid people." She agrees.

Expand full comment
founding

You should because they view YOU as THE VIRUS.

This is all happened for three fundamental reasons:

1. Can't prove a negative

2. Sunk Cost Fallacy (for PHA's and a majority of public)

3. There's no way to develop a hypothesis that can provide proofs of anything, beyond "belief" and "disbelief", if it's not falsifiable. Find me a study/hypothesis about masks that was inherently falsifiable. Explain to me an experiment at either the individual level or societal level that is capable (in the real world about masks) of being tested for being wrong.

The scientific method was abandoned, precisely because they were simply trying to prove data instead of TESTING the data. And one of the main reasons they did that is because the global experiment would allow them to be able to say, "mistakes were made" ("but not on a net basis"...of course) AND that they were fucking LEARNING...of course...because...you know... it's a very scary NOVEL virus.

This is all a farce because they were never testing anything, other than how much control they could gain and how much power they could wield, unresisted, to meet those ends...and what they could get away with next time.

A quadrillion bits and bytes are nothing but digital detritus in your hypothesis if they can't be tested for falsifiability. And the kicker is masking is just one variable in the grand/global experiment they were conducting, that was based on a multitude of measures that had the same pseudo-scientific properties as masking. So, not only was masking unfalsifiable, but so was every other variable in the global experiment, that consisted of dozens of measures that the scientific method would've rejected wholesale.

An experiment where every variable is unfalsifiable, is just that; so utterly unfalsifiable that trying to control for confounders (every single measure/variable affected every other unfalsifiable variable) was an exercise in futility...because only one variable has to be unfalsifiable for the entire hypothesis to fail...let alone EVERY single variable inuring unfalsifiability to all other variables!

The perfect Swiss Army Knife for fucking bureaucrats.

Expand full comment

just like "climate science" then

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

"There's no way to develop a hypothesis that can provide proofs of anything, beyond "belief" and "disbelief", **if it's not falsifiable**"

https://youtu.be/Zk5Il6KQrd8?si=GqXgWoWsJio28xvT

If it's not falsifiable, it's not Science and, in this case, definitely Teh Science™.

Expand full comment
founding

Yup!

As the mafia is to government, the Drug Lords are to big pharma/PHA'S, combined as one gang, they are tyrants of millions of little tyrants. They have the power to change the meaning of words, at their whim, for their purposes, in broad daylight, to the exact opposite of the universally understood prior definition, and have confidence to do so without opposition and with virtually zero detection by the public

The relationship is fraught with exploitation and myriad landmines of "unintended consequences". Not to mention the breathtaking lawlessness, mendacity, malfeasance, mockery, malice, avarice and abject depravity displayed with no shame, for 3 years of our lives.

They de facto advertised, nonstop for two years, to a captive global population, their ability to subsume your agency with wicked stealth camoflauged by a Cabal of Consensus manufactured to give the appearance that resistance is futile.

They just concluded a global Proof of Concept exercise that validated their idea/product wholesale. They continue to demonstrate their intent; to be the eternal sole guardian of the tools, the tool belt and the blueprints for any "project", of their choosing, at any time, for "emergencies" they define. Of most importance they inadvertently discovered that the subjects of their experiment have no desire to understand the results of the experiment nor to learn whether THE SCIENCE should ever be used again.

The product is CONTROL; the control of a complacent, compliant and cowardly public that gave them the power to appoint themselves the "unmoved mover", free from the demands of external agency, to be the master of your autonomy.

They obliterated the SCIENTIFIC METHOD overnight and turned it into a belief system branded as THE SCIENCE. They have effectively obliterated the only universal reference we have for questioning our world and seeking truth.

They have granted themselves the power to obliterate history.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like a gang of cruel gods that needs to be disbanded, with urgency, before they control the remembrance of an unwitting publics history.

Expand full comment

Personally, I see no difference between the mafia and the government. Both operate using extortion, theft and the threat of violence if you don't comply. The only real difference is that the government gets away with it.

Expand full comment
founding

well then, you might like my one of my favorite quotes:

"Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract."

- Jeffrey Tucker

Expand full comment

Are social contracts a myth, though?

Expand full comment

"Government is a gang"

But they both still use "Nice <insert nice thing you that you definitely did build *thumbs nose at Obama*> you've got here. A shame if something were to happen to it." thing to ensure compliance.

Guys in pinstripes. IRS Agents. Same thing.

https://imgflip.com/i/8587gz

Expand full comment

"They have granted themselves the power to obliterate history."

Ah, yes.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.

- 1984, George Orwell

Expand full comment

They don't have to obliterate it when they write it. I know that the history I was taught in grade school through college was a lie and American history is mostly propaganda.

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

Sounds like you had Howard Zinn for history.

While I'm sure some of it was embellished to make our heroes bigger and better, I wouldn't assume that it was even significantly propaganda.

Expand full comment
founding

My understanding is that propaganda was perfected during the effort to convince the American public that we should enter WW1.

Expand full comment
founding

You might like this book if you haven't already read it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1793626138?tag=uuid10-20

Expand full comment
founding

Exactly Pi Guy!

You're always on top of it!

Expand full comment

Which is why this banana in my air safely kept all the alligators from attacking me in my home.

Expand full comment

Here's what I want to know: WHERE do the diktats to mask up even come from? It seems that the waves of masking occur at random. Are they all plugged in to some "mask regulator" that the rest of us aren't (thank God) privy to?

Expand full comment

For a while I left open the news feed on my Windows laptop in order to see what nonsense normies gobbled up. Lots of stuff about trannies and masks. Then I shut it down.

Expand full comment

Does the newsfeed have mask advisories for normies? Kind of like an air quality warning?

"You are 76% more likely to be exposed to Omicron Persei 8 today; better mask up!"

Expand full comment

No, it's more subtle than that. Pictures of people in masks and or articles tacitly pushing them.

Expand full comment

Recently saw a man in a mask walk in to 7-Eleven and purchase a package of cigarettes. Then he walked out, removed the mask, and lit up. Still trying to figure that one out.

Expand full comment

Covid to them is a huge question mark.

What if they dealt with smoking the way they did with Covid. What if they convinced that smoke itself was cancerous...and that the second hand smoke thing was far more dangerous than the act of smoking itself? What if it was that you stopped smoking not for you, but everyone around you?

There are some parallels to be drawn here.

Incidentally, while my mother who was a lifelong smoker died of lung cancer in 2003, I am for not only smoking, but I would allow restaurants and businesses to bring back smoking at their establishments.

Expand full comment

Somehow that reminds me of someone who used to go to 7-11 for his "Why Bother." That would be a big decaf with artificial creamer and a packet of SweetNLow.

Expand full comment

I do as well. I can’t help myself but to loath their stupidity, compliance and sheer fucking assholeness! Sorry Cat 🐈‍⬛ can’t help myself ☺️🤷‍♀️

Expand full comment

I agree with you about when they try to enlist others into the medical theater.

Expand full comment
founding

Lolol! Genuine lmao

Expand full comment

"But I am seeing more and more fools wearing them."

"Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_66KLWwV0I

Fezzik FTW!

Expand full comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_qSJqf6xms

Everything by Media Bear about Covid masks is spot on and hilarious.

Expand full comment

"My way is not very sportsmanlike."

Expand full comment

"In the meantime, rest well and dream of large women."

Expand full comment

I don't. I despise the government and the "educational system" and they will be held accountable if they demand others accommodate them as well (or force their children to participate). But if they are doing it themselves and not demanding it of others, I feel just sadness and disappointment.

Expand full comment

You're a better man than I am. I loathe and have deep contempt for these weak cowards.

Expand full comment

El Gato highlights the strategy of what was done to them. Most of them do what they do. They mask, they obey the rules, that's it. There are plenty of us that do the same thing.Do you loathe people who sit at red lights at 3am for not blowing through them? Do you loathe people who won't walk across a street when there is no traffic?

By themselves they aren't harmful save for the message they are sending (probably unintentionally) to others that we are bare faced plague spreaders.

It's the other s: the lease to yell at others that gets me. They lose me as soon as they hang a "mask required" sign outside their shop or restaurant, because now it's not just them.

Expand full comment

I respectfully disagree. I admire your greater empathy or patience, which I all but have in my actions insofar as I engage with these people at all, but their overly zealous law-abidingness, if indeed that is what it is, is not akin to people sit at red lights at three in the morning or people who won't jaywalk. Their cravenness and herd morality enabled the utter renunciation of our societies, pretty much the world over, to petty tyrants and inhuman bureaucrats in a way that mere lawfulness and the decency that allows it and that it in turn encourages do not do. It may be mean spirited or nasty to despise these people, but it is entirely understandable to do so. I suspect, though, that this is not mere law-abidingness. If it were, it wouldn't have expressed itself in the frantic desire to make all other people--young and old, sick and healthy, male and female, etc., etc.--conform or else. Their attitude is a result of an absolute collapse of any standard informing the goal--the summum bonum--of social and human life other than mere health (i.e., health understood as the avoidance of disease and death). The fact that that goal turns out even to be intolerable for the practitioners of it is indicated by their utter fanaticism in attempting to enforce it.

Expand full comment

I am glad you disagree with me. There would be no reason to properly think things out, or to be challenged on them if we all agreed with one another.

I think I hear what you are saying. You are saying that our compliance and cravenness and herd mentality enabled the utter renunciation of our society to petty tyrants. I am going to give you some examples and this will be a "whataboutism."

What about the 74 year old woman who wore a mask on the bus to get to a doctor's appointment?

What about the 57 year old amputee who wore a mask to take an Uber ride to his doctor's appointment so he could get authorized to get his prosthetic leg to help out his mobility.

What about the mother who, the condition of seeing her son in the hospital with cancer, had to wear a mask?

What about the people who had to mask to travel?

What about those who had to mask or lose their jobs?

I understand why you despise those people, except I am one of them. You have every right to despise me, I despise myself. Myself even more because I knew masks didn't work and did so because I was afraid of the consequences, not of the virus, but of not obeying the rules.

The reason I can have empathy is because I am that person you despise. The people you may despise could very well be the crazy woman at the market demanding everyone else mask.

Or it could be a 57 year old amputee who just wants to get a prosthetic leg so he can get back to whatever normal was in 2019.

Expand full comment

I doubt I despise you. And I don't despise the people you mention either, at least not for the reasons you mention (I don't know them, but I understand why you make mention of them). I despise the otherwise healthy people who bought into this very obvious fraud and enforced it with their apparent virtue (really vice) from very early on.

More importantly, though, one can always give reasons or justifications (as you have done here) for apparent, but perhaps merely apparent, obedience to tyranny. I do think, though, that at one point or another (this is different for different people, obviously), matters of health--mere health, bodily health--have to be trumped by considerations of character and the soul. Standing up to a sickly world of dehumanizing bureaucracy and the tyrants sitting atop it in the name of genuine virtue and freedom is more important, ultimately, than this or that example--and I am sure you could provide many more, as could I--of submitting to authoritarian dictates given in the name, but only the name, of protecting bodily health. In other words, is the soul for the sake of the body or should the body be for the sake of the soul? I like to imagine the latter option should prevail, even though I am sure I am a hypocrite in that respect, as in so many others. Still, the principle is what matters here. If we lose sight of that, we're done for.

Expand full comment

I do feel sorry for them. But, it does worry me for my own safety, just a bit, in a world full of psy-oped robots.....

Expand full comment

Ditto

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

So I’ve stopped at a rest area to use the head. There is not much traveling as this is around the peak of the Covid hysteria. Two urinals, one of them occupied by some masked, wimpy looking guy. My mask? Back in the car. We are almost shoulder to shoulder. He looks at me and taps his mask. I ignore his entreaty. He repeats the tapping with more insistence. I finish my business, turn to him and say “I am glad you agree with me that masks don’t work.” He manages to mumble some surprised reply that amounts to “WHAT?” “Yes”, I say, “If you believed that masks did work, then you’d have the confidence to know that when two of us are together and only one of us is masked that we are both safe!” With that I left and for all I know he might be still trying to figure this out.

Expand full comment

well, perhaps after you left, his hair went up in flames.

They do not understand anything that is not what they are told by "experts"

Expand full comment

My guess he never did figure it out and never will.

Expand full comment

Oh, I think he's figured it all out just fine.

It's not that he was worried about his health, or yours.

No, he was trying to be a bully. Bullies only pick on people that they're certain they'll beat but often end surprised when someone punches back. Or perhaps as is sometimes better, punches first.

Expand full comment

What bothers me the most about the mask madness is that, around hundred years ago, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, they tried masks and found that they didn't work.

Expand full comment

Think of the C19 masks thusly: They were a symbol of compliance. Whether or not they worked is unimportant. If you wore a face diaper you were on the team paying fealty to your betters.

Expand full comment

Exactly. Masks were a con and a psy-op both.

Expand full comment

And yet, they will use the Spanish Flu as an example of why masks work.

Expand full comment

Your response was so superior to what mine would have been, lol!

I would have just cracked up, and started laughing hysterically, at this stage in the mask game!

Oh, God, really?? Your mask will save you, ok?

My smiling face is neutralized by your impenetrable shield! Right?!

I just can't keep a straight face....

; ))

Expand full comment

The over-the-line example...would be to ask them "Speaking of masks, have you seen the meme of the person urinating on the other person not wearing pants as an anology for masks?

Expand full comment

"I finish my business, turn to him..."

Too bad you didn't do those in the opposite order.

Expand full comment

The concept that I am literally "responsible" for someone else's anything (especially their health and safety) is ridiculous... If you want me to wear a mask in the grocery store to "protect you" while you shop then we are going to have to have a discussion about that soda and those hoho's and king don's in your cart...

Your health and safety has always been about YOUR personal responsibility... Phuck you and your mask... the option to stay bunkered down in the safety and seclusion of your home was NEVER taken away from you... For the rest of us, not so much... I WILL NOT COMPLY... ever...

Expand full comment

I’m a 75 yo granny. I actually told a man in Walmart who made a remark about where was my mask to f-off. Surprised myself there. The look on his masked face was, well, priceless. I was often the only one without one. I did comply at first. But I would often look people right in the eyes and smile as time went on. I will not comply.

Expand full comment

"’m a 75 yo granny. I actually told a man in Walmart who made a remark about where was my mask to f-off."

I do like me some Spicy Walmart Grannies.

More, please.

Expand full comment

I’ve actually got my own grey hair now. Looking the part. I’m ready!!

Expand full comment

good for you Janet.

Expand full comment

Brava!!

Expand full comment

I would have paid to see this Janet!

Expand full comment

"The concept that I am literally "responsible" for someone else's anything"

We have ways of making you pass the borscht, Comrade.

Expand full comment

I always laughed when I saw overweight people out shopping with a cart full of junk food but they were always wearing a mask because they cared about "health".

Expand full comment

Or driving those little supermarket carts, with their masks on, first thing they have ever done for their health was put a mask on.

Expand full comment

In our company's intranet the loudest supporter of quakcines were the biggest overweight guy. He must be way above 200kg. He is literally a walking blob. It was the most absurd rant everytime he demanded people to mask up and go to be vaccinated.

Expand full comment

Exactly. Dr Melissa Sell says something similar, like your health is your responsibility as is mine…

Expand full comment

And keep in mind...chances are these people you are having interactions with have almost no risk of dying from Covid...much less having a bad outcome from it...but now the narrative has moved to Long Covid.

Expand full comment

The "Narrative" always changes once the jig is up and their arguments have been found wanting... Anyone remember "Global Warming"? Pepperidge Farm remembers... How it magically morphed into "Global Climate change"... Time to roll out the guillotines..

Expand full comment

"these people are literally admitting that they have no self control or self possession and that they require the rest of the world to “ally” with them to make it all OK. it’s an admission that they are neither autonomous nor adult. it is always you and not they who must change, you and not they who must accommodate.

-----------

Ultimately, you can bitch and moan about how life is unfair all you want, but in the end you're left with the same choice -- suck it up and do it, or never get anywhere. And sooner or later, people will be tired of holding you up........especially if you're always talking about how morally superior you are and how you would be successful if only XYZ.

Expand full comment

I think what we are seeing is just how much undiagnosed mental illness there is, and the effect of ‘modern medicine’ and its self-serving determination to invent a medical condition for nearly every aspect of life so it can profit from endless testing and treatments, resulting in widespread hypochondria.

Expand full comment

I don’t know if it’s so much mental illness - though there is that percentage at work for sure - as much as the transformation of medicine into a virtual religion, and that is very recent 20th century occurrence.

When “health benefits” became attached to jobs, suddenly people felt almost an obligation to take advantage of them. It became an obsession with some, at the least an annual ritual to lay your body before the exalted doctors to pronounce you “well” or with defect. And the amount of people I would see from work go to the doctor for every splinter or sniffle was stunning.

It is so ingrained into the culture today that to go without it one is considered reckless or irresponsible.

Expand full comment

I agree. The obsession with getting tested, which inevitably if they can’t actually find anything wrong, the Medicine Man will declare you ‘at risk from_____________ “ or “pre-diabetic” and put you on a lifetime of a cocktail of drugs.

During the CoVid calamity, I heard of of people testing negative and so disappointed they would repeat the test two or three times until they got a positive result, and whilst they would not believe a number of negative results, they readily believed the one positive. Almost as if they had won a prize. They also, it turned out, had been jabbed but seemed undismayed they had got CoVid anyway because… less serious.

Expand full comment

My MIL was sick, really heavy respiratory something, reminded of bronchitis mostly. She tested like 8 times in three weeks - really painfully coughing nearly non-stop all day and night for the whole middle 10 days there - and I still her say to someone on the phone, "At least it was't COVID."

I was only able to do two consecutive Face Palms instead of the Double Face Palm this statement deserved.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=400396633

Expand full comment

Covid would have been so much worse. Which now that I say it, sounds eerily like another mantra.

Expand full comment

This guy gets it.

Expand full comment

Ppl are still testing! I always ask why? Wtf are you doing that? 🙄 FFS

Expand full comment

Oh my God this is soo true! It was fanatical. In some cases still is!

Argh.

Expand full comment

I agree with that! I've never been one to see a doctor for anything less than bleeding out or broken. I am 55 and quite healthy. All my friends shake their heads and insinuate that I'm making a dangerous decision because "you never know". Meanwhile, they are all taking multiple prescriptions, having multiple tests done and having genuine health difficulties. They cannot see the correlation between their 'health care' and their 'health scares'. It's astounding to me.

Expand full comment

I've felt guilty over the years, when I think about it, about not getting my tetanus booster. Do you know how many people die of tetanus each year? I think the number is around 700.

Expand full comment

Kabuki is the perfect description of the US in the 2020’s. I choose to remain a spectator and not join the rush of the audience to jump onto the stage.

Expand full comment

Were you ever in a position to feel you were pressured to do so?

Expand full comment

No.

Expand full comment

I was like you through 2020 and all the way up to October of 2021. Then I got diabetic cellulitus, had to be hospitalized, and they gave me a mask to wear on entry into the hospital. Once admitted, I had to wear one outside of my room but not inside...don't ask me why viruses can't travel outside hospital rooms, but once you get out of the room the virus can travel.

Expand full comment

Oh no. I’m sorry. I dread the thought of going to the hospital.

Expand full comment

IDK SC...the trannys are doing a spectacular job of erasing women....

Expand full comment

This is why you’re the Commander.

Expand full comment

"but in the end you're left with the same choice -- suck it up and do it, or never get anywhere. And sooner or later, people will be tired of holding you up"

Perhaps not for the first time historically, this time there was an incredible people who managed to profit, often bigly, by making victimhood a business.

Expand full comment

I have noticed my mental health improving, in inverse proportion to the number of masked faces surrounding me. This has been a weird, unsettling and informative exercise for me. Where I live, mask wearing does not appear to be on the increase -- rather, it never entirely went away. There has been about 5% of people still wearing them for the past several months.

It is "the emperor has no clothes." And the ones in the minority (compliant) are the deviants. I'm not playing that game. It's important to take a stand.

Expand full comment

Yes, it never entirely went away.

And how could it not? As Gato states, and I have said the same thing...the propaganda now self-replicates.

Expand full comment

What I cannot fathom is how these mid-wits came to such prominence & power. Most of this stuff would’ve been laughed & eye-rolled into shame & embarrassment not so long ago. Irrefutable evidence of a very sick society. I hope we can recover but I have my doubts....

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

Would it help to keep referring to them as "face diapers"?

My mother-in-law used to constantly enable some weird fast-talk gibberish mode on her phone by dragging two fingers across the screen. I had to drive over right then and fix it because she couldn't be without facebook to see how her kids, grandkids, great-grandkids were doing.

I finally told her that she was going into the handicapped mode (and it was), and that ended the problem. She didn't want to be thought of as handicapped.

Essentially, people are DYING to avoid being labeled, and if "face diaper" does it, I'm cool with it. Personally, I couldn't care less about being called names. They're just labels thrown at me by weak-minded people.

I *WILL* say, that I wouldn't wear a mask, and was often the only one, and it was a bit tough standing up against that "pressure" of everyone else thinking you're a jerk in a store. But I started spotting more and more taking masks off, and it was much easier. But I was still the jerk. :-) (I'm sorry if I understood science, folks. Didja read the small print on the packages of masks as well that says it won't stop a virus???)

Expand full comment

A lady threatened to call the manager on me for not wearing a mask at the check out last summer. She was checking out and I was probably 4th in line. I told her to just finish her business and leave. She was pissed but the guy ringing her up just ignored her as did I.

Expand full comment

"and if "face diaper" does it, I'm cool with it."

I'm actually cool with Laugh and Point.

Expand full comment

RIGHT??!!

Expand full comment

They fill a void that sane intelligent people don’t occupy.

Expand full comment

See also the gato postulate about being ruled by rubes.

Expand full comment

Here’s an interesting item via Daily Sceptic:

March 4th 2020: The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) bans advertisements by two companies for claiming face masks could protect against Covid. The ASA says the adverts were “misleading” because the claims went against official advice.

A spokesman said Public Health England informed the ASA “that it does not recommend the use of face masks as a means of protection from coronavirus”. “We understood there was very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use outside of clinical settings,” the ASA said in a statement, adding that “prolonged use of masks was likely to reduce compliance with good universal hygiene behaviours” like frequent hand-washing.

Professor Stephen Powis, NHS Medical Director, comments: “Callous firms looking to maximise profits by pushing products that fly in the face of official advice is outright dangerous and has rightly been banned.”

Then:

May 5th 2020: U.K. Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance now tells MPs masks could have “marginal but positive impact”.

May 11th 2020: Government plan “advises” public to “wear face coverings in crowded places and wash their clothes regularly”.

May 27th 2020: In the U.S., Dr. Fauci tells CNN: “I wear it for the reason that I believe it is effective. It is not 100% effective. It’s sort of respect for another person and have that other person respect you.”

May 27th 2020: Stephanie Warriner is choked to death by hospital guards in Toronto, Canada, for wearing a Covid mask “too low”.

June 4th 2020: Transport Secretary Grant Shapps announces that “face coverings” – “not surgical masks – the kind of face covering you can easily make at home” – will be compulsory on public transport from June 15th, on pain of fines up to £100. “We’re doing what many other countries have asked transport users to do.” A Freedom of Information later reveals this decision was made based on no peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

June 5th 2020: Government announces that effective June 15th, staff will be required to wear surgical masks – and visitors and outpatients “face coverings” – in all NHS hospitals.”

Hard to imagine why trust in Government has sunk so low.

Expand full comment

The incrementalism with which they did this is pure evil. And very few people pushed back. Those that did were stripped off social media or had their careers ruined.

Expand full comment

This old bitch won't be masking up for anyone. I like “your pathology is your problem, stop making it mine.” I'm going to use that : )

Expand full comment

I just upgraded to a paid membership. Your writings are the most insightful, provocative, interesting and well-written of any source I’ve been able to find anywhere over the past several years. I’ve shared many of your columns with friends and family, but just had to join the cat army to support what you’re doing here. Thank you!

Expand full comment
author

welcome to team toxoplasmosis.

hope you enjoy the sunday memes. (i certainly enjoy sending them)

Expand full comment

They make my day

Expand full comment

They are the BEST! I love a sharp wit and yours is a scalpel. :-)

Expand full comment

I subscribe under another name for the memes. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Expand full comment

If you ever cancel the Sunday memes, I'm outta here!

/J

Expand full comment

I came here for the graphs and charts but stayed for the Sunday Memepool.

Expand full comment

If masks or jabs were effective, if A is wearing a mask, has been ritually, habitually jabbed, B doesn’t need either. A is protected from infection by B, B is protected from infection by A. What is difficult to understand about that? Evidently the masker-jabbers are such intellectually weak nitwits it is beyond them.

Expand full comment

But then we had that ridiculous "pee" analogy the maskers loved to cling to. The concept of "if this protects you, nobody else needs to do it" was lost on them. Even today, so many seem to want to return to masks - no amount of common sense or real research or anything will sway them from the idea that a mask protects you somehow. I look at the regions that had like 99% "compliance" in masking and how that did absolutely nothing to make their numbers better - but the true believers will still blame that on those who weren't wearing a mask. :(

If your shot works ... why doesn't it work? :)

Expand full comment

That’s Gato’s point - these are the types of miserable psychos who want EVERYONE to be a miserable psycho too.

Expand full comment

I'm sorry, John. You just don't have the faith to observe the proper rituals.

Expand full comment
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023

I’ve always been first on the dance floor. I am no different in this.

My friends weren’t allowed to speak to me (by their pussified husbands) back in early 2020 because I made jokes about the ridiculousness of Covid and masks. Now they all see the absurdity of it. I allow them to forget about how they treated me, but I will never. Honestly, it helps me in my resolve for speaking up about other things. The world has gone mad and I won’t be quiet.

Expand full comment

“Your mask protects me” unites the covert narcissist personality disorder types coming out of the woodwork

Expand full comment

Societal Neurosis gone psychosis. The media and government are deliberately trying to drive everyone mad. Doug Casey may be absolutely correct. It’s time to leave here but not sure where to go.

Expand full comment

We are at a point where we are expected to accommodate and affirm those who “no self control or self possession and ... require the rest of the world to ‘ally’ with them to make it all OK.” As the recently leaked manifesto of the young woman who shot up a Christian school in Nashville makes clear, the hectoring sometimes will turn violent. Most people do not want to offend anyone, particularly in ordinary daily interactions, but the only way to put and to these assaults on the right, ultimately, to say what you believe is true, is to politely not go along, whether it’s masks, pronouns or anything else.

Expand full comment

if we do not comply, WE are the shitty people, we are probably MAGAs and pro gun and anti killing babies.

Expand full comment

I am MAGA, not a gun owner (but pro-2A and individual liberty) and pro-life. Like most Trump supporters I know, I’m also friendly, courteous, willing to give people space (if they give me space) and willing to respectfully argue my positions. If that makes me and all of us “shitty,” so be it.

Expand full comment

Ha! Did you just replace "deplorable " with "shitty people "🤔

Expand full comment

"In nature, poisonous creatures will often develop bright colors to warn others of their toxicity".

Perfect.

Expand full comment

"Your mask protects me" was the precursor to "No one is safe until everyone is safe."

Expand full comment