wait until the CDC grants itself the authority to quarter soldiers in your home.
on the bright, side, at least you won’t have to pay rent…
in all seriousness, there is A LOT of ugly chatter coming out of DC right now. the feds are chomping at the bit to push federal vaccine passports, but know they likely lack the authority.
so they will push it out to the “private sector” yet fund it, set standards, and unify databases. you know billy gates would love to get in on that perpetual gravy train. then they will, inch by inch, force them into acceptance. start small, individual companies, some chains, some cities. but that’s how the anaconda gets you around the ankles. and once it does, it does not let go.
the fact that they are using lapdog outlets like AP to float trial balloons (or as best “outrageous ask gambits” to anchor debate) this insane should terrify you, even if they then panic and immediately walk it back. and clearly, some folks are clamoring for this stuff… sigh.
the world is full of willing brownshirts like barbara. they seem to care only about feasibility. they certainly do not care about you or your rights.
my guess is this just leaked early/generated worse backlash than expected and now they are playing “duck and cover.”
as history has shown us all year, current disavowal can turn to future implementation in the blink of a media cycle. note the weasel words of “at this moment.” that’s far from an assurance they would not do such a thing. if it were off the table, they would not use such a qualifier.
the safe assumption is this is absolutely in their planning schema. (and you’re not gonna like where it leads.)
mandating “your papers please” for interstate travel? wait until they grab the FAA and mandate it for all flights.
changing reimbursement for those unvaccinated? wait until they link this to social media and do the same for “wrongthink.”
you do NOT want the thin end of this wedge going in.
note that they are not even discussing ideas like:
is this legal?
is this moral?
is this in accordance with principles of liberty?
are we being horrible, evil, dictatorial totalitarians?
they never even question their right to do this or the righteousness of doing so. they just worry it might be “too polarizing.” seriously?
that’s the logic of a psychopath.
and, of course, the cure for polarization is MOAR FEAR. unify the nation against an enemy. tell it it’s under attack. trot out new variants, new fears, new foes.
vilify the unvaccinated and ignore the pesky fact that vaccines are clearly failing and losing efficacy over time, at least in terms of sterilizing immunity.
your vaccine does not protect me nor mine you. you still get covid. you still spread covid.
even the CDC says so.
no sane person would be trying to mandate vaccines as source control when it’s obvious they do not work as such unless they had ulterior motives. ask israel and iceland how that’s going. boosters do not fix this. these vaccines simply do not aid herd immunity all that much. only exposure and recovery does.
they are not even trying to make sense anymore. they are just trying to see what they can get away with. these are probing raids for the future push. it’s the setup for november/december and the zeta variant to be optioned later.
@cernovich captures the zeitgeist perfectly here:
but i’d like to take this a step further.
i once had a truly brilliant professor who taught “politics of the legal system.” he was fond of saying
“i can win any argument on any topic with any person at any time if you simply allow me to be the one who poses the question.”
this is a surprisingly deep statement about framing and it’s intensely germane to the current issues around covid restrictions.
we’re letting them frame the question.
it’s always “does this intervention work?” or “does this mandate reduce X?” these are the wrong questions.
sure, they are losers for team “lock down and mask up”, but they place the debate on the wrong turf and force us to shovel back an endless supply of new lies, made up facts, bought and paid for shills pushing credentials over science and data, and increasingly simply making stuff up and peddling it to a credulous citizenry.
what has gone begging in this framing is “so what?'“
even if these things DID work, so what? what gives them the right to force them upon you? what ends your liberty and enables their mandate? by what just power or ethical precept can they take your agency away?
the term “inalienable” attached to rights was not some extraneous redundancy. it’s the literal foundational precept of a republic.
the rights of we the people, of each individual, stand paramount to the state. it may not intrude upon them or abrogate them. they are intrinsic to you and inviolate.
this is where the “appeal to common practice” fallacy gets trotted out. “well, they mandated X before, so how is this different?” this is a terrible argument and invalid on its face. past outrage does not justify new ones. chattel slavery was once the law and practice. did that make it right or moral?
the same laws and precedent people love to use to defend vaccine mandates were used to justify japanese internment camps and mandatory sterilizations. you really wanna go there? that’s not moral high ground and neither is “because it’s for the social good.” that one is a truly vile and false framing.
there is no “social good” in any knowable sense. it’s an aggregation fallacy. if harming me makes you feel better, how can we even decide which outweighs the other? are you more happy or am i more hurt? is it even moral to hurt some to please others? who gets to pick? who decides what values to weigh? because none of these choices affect just one thing.
we could mandate physical fitness and healthy diet and get rid of 60% of US medical costs. we could stop countless early deaths. we could limit medicare and medicaid to the lean and fit. “if you won’t take care of you, why should we?” the savings would make all the rest of healthcare free while cutting US federal spending.
yet almost no one would support this highly effective strategy with little to no side effects and a clear “social good” if we limit our discussion to health, lifespan, and productivity.
this is because we (correctly) see it as a monstrous imposition into personal sovereignty. who are you to force me to be healthy, eat kale, and do cardio day even if it’s good for me, good for us, saves money, and makes me less likely to carry disease, infect others, and get needlessly sick?
well, huh. that sounds a lot like “who are you to force me to take an experimental vaccine that likely poses me net harm even in the unlikely event it might protect you? what valid moral structure calls “forced conscription of human shields” ethical?
pro tip: not one you want to live near.
“societal good” is the last refuge of the amoral villain with no real case to make. it’s the bad, predatory framing of the tyrant and the totalitarian that uses slight of hand to hide the injection of a presumed and unverifiable moral and value structure.
it inevitably ends up with “we had to burn the village to save it” and your rights and freedom burn with it.
fighting endlessly with these experts is a sucker bet. it’s their home field and a rigged framing. they can be totally wrong, over and over, and it does not matter. they are not there to convince you or to provide data. they are there to misframe the issue.
they are not the trick, they are the stage magician’s flourish to draw your attention away from where the trick is being done.
do you seriously think anyone with 3 brain cells to rub together believes fauci or eric ding? they’re not designed to be compelling, at least to anyone with basic critical thinking faculties. they are designed to be infuriating, to be captivating, to be distracting.
we get so absorbed countering their latest barrage of baloney that we take our eye of the real ball: that the anadonda is taking liberty after liberty while we fight about CFR and whether a new variant is vaccine evading.
understanding the medical salients is all well and good, but in terms of preserving our liberty and livelihoods, we’re in the wrong fight, guys. we’ve been sucked into an endless and unwinnable rope a dope.
you get to keep the rights you’ll fight for.
there’s no changing that.
arguing that all these measures provide “social good” when so much of society clearly does not want them is like claiming that women were made less unhappy by being denied the vote than men were made happier by having all the power and using that as a defense for banning female suffrage.
you cannot aggregate “good” that way or ever measure all the variables involved. and everyone will lie. this is why we must all have the right to say “no” to escape predation by would be social planners cum tyrants.
the powers being discussed will stay around for a long time. the wild outlier from one emergency becomes the SOP in the next one. even if you trust these guys, imagine all this power wielded by the politician you hate most because one day, it will be.
your rights are your line of defense against this.
protect them and they protect you. neglect them, and get used to serfdom…
trading rights for safety will inevitably leave you with neither.
We rely on precedent, but we also distinguish cases.
For example, the Supreme Court in Jacobson (1906) held that:
(1) Given an infectious disease with a 30% fatality rate,
(2) And a a vaccine that's been in use for over a century,
(3) And few if any alternatives to in-person contact,
(4) The government can impose a small fine if you refuse the vaccine.
We can argue that Jacobson was wrongly decided, but it's not obviously crazy *given those facts*.
However, it's far from obvious that it can be transmuted into:
(1) Given a disease with extremely low fatality,
(2) And novel vaccines with limited efficacy,
(3) And alternatives to in-person contact,
(4) The government can destroy you if you refuse the vaccine.
Granted, this is like confronting a lynch mob with a legal brief. I may have the best argument in the world, and a list of authorities a mile long, but presenting it to them shows that I've misunderstood the nature of the encounter in a very fundamental way.
Still, to the extent they claim what they're doing is law, it's useful to point out that it's a façade.
boycott, divest, strike.... soon time for a general strike to oppose the dictators.... i already will nopt go to tsa, i will not do business with stores that mandate masks or vaxxes. i will do only emergency medicine since my hospital system mandated vaxxes.... stand up!
As many of us have said from the beginning, "your fear doesn't trump my rights" and "there is no pandemic exception to the Constitution."
I posted this definition of "sociopath" elsewhere. It seems apt:
Sociopath: “A personality disorder; chronic antisocial behavior and violation of the law; a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others; capable of violent acts without guilt feelings; manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others.”
Thanks to Maria Popova @brainpicker brainpickings.org for this brilliant piece which is particularly apropos in the current madness:
What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is. (In my own life, looking back on my ten most important learnings from the first ten years of Brain Pickings, I placed the practice of the small, mighty phrase “I don’t know” at the very top.) But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement — a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.”
That difficult feat of insurgency is what the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explored in 1996 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for capturing the transcendent fragility of the human experience in masterpieces like “Life-While-You-Wait” and “Possibilities.”
“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.””
Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In a sentiment of chilling prescience today, as we witness tyrants drunk on certainty drain the world of its essential inspiration, Szymborska considers the destructive counterpoint to this generative not-knowing:
“All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.”
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The madness of mass delusion. It’s as though the insane emperor without clothes discovered an ancient medical journal extolling the amazing health benefits of bloodletting and so decreed that everyone in the kingdom must have their blood let. Not only is everyone afraid to tell the emperor he has no clothes, but now they set about letting blood from every man, woman and child. No matter that the emperor is mad. No matter that bloodletting has long since been determined to be dangerously harmful rather than beneficial. No matter that those subjected to it are egregiously harmed. Bloodletting has been decreed for the health of all, so bloodlet we must. No one any longer bothers to ask why are we doing this? No one dares to question its wisdom. No none has the courage to say, “But we know this to be harmful. It makes no sense to bloodlet people.” This is partly what happens when critical thinking is no longer taught or even allowed in schools. “We are paid to bloodlet not to ask questions. Don’t confuse us with the facts. We have a job to do and we will not cease until we have let the blood of every single person.” The guards at Auschwitz had similar rationalizations. Now march!
I think I was on The Spectator UK below-the-line comments when I asked, "what is your first step for Totalitarianism?". Granted, I was mostly preaching to the choir there but there were a couple of lockdown fans there. Of course they had no answer. Some people really think one night they'll go to sleep in a perfectly functioning republic then overnight, a dictator will appear with tanks and troops goosestepping down the street.
btw I think many, many people would very happily clap if the govt decided to mandate forced cardio and healthy eating. many people around me would love dissenters having to do those things within the walls of a "special work camp"!
Turns out the nightmare scenario of AI driving our lives, from cars to planes and everyday decisions, wondering how silicon circuits would end up solving the Trolley Problem at every instance, pales in comparison with the reality of Troll Politicians creating and worsening a problem AI would solve in a sec (without sacrificing our freedom).
Can anyone cite the study or studies used to satisfy Koch's postulate for sars cov 2? Has this thing been purified? I'm guessing that it hasn't, but maybe it has.
We are “entitled to make [our] own medical treatment decisions, and have a constitutional right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice." Not any more, you don't, says SCOTUS. We all just went from pseudo-citizens to digital slaves.
I love it when you're angry, hermano. On fire, here.
Meanwhile, I reckon you can stick a fork in the Nuremburg Convention, now, in the US. It is well and truly steamrollered: "After losing two rounds in lower federal courts, a group of Indiana University students challenging the school’s coronavirus vaccine were dealt a final blow Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the college’s vaccination requirement. In the first coronavirus vaccine mandate challenge of its kind before the nation’s highest court, the eight Indiana University (I.U.) students requested an emergency order, arguing that they are adults who are “entitled to make their own medical treatment decisions, and have a constitutional right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice in the context of a vaccination mandate.”
We live in a post-Constitutional, post-rule of law, post-free speech society. And not so much as a peep of protest or even dissent. As a society, we deserve what we get, I suppose.
"they are not even trying to make sense anymore. they are just trying to see what they can get away with."
Is it me or it started with the confinement of Wuhan? I remember telling a friend back in January 2020: "they cannot do that!"... It has been a while I stopped looking for logic and stopped thinking they cannot do anything absurd on the face of it!
"You keep the rights you fight for."
Please print on a T-shirt. Put a cat on it.
The hills we are willing to die on have come into view.
They also get the past outrages wrong.
We rely on precedent, but we also distinguish cases.
For example, the Supreme Court in Jacobson (1906) held that:
(1) Given an infectious disease with a 30% fatality rate,
(2) And a a vaccine that's been in use for over a century,
(3) And few if any alternatives to in-person contact,
(4) The government can impose a small fine if you refuse the vaccine.
We can argue that Jacobson was wrongly decided, but it's not obviously crazy *given those facts*.
However, it's far from obvious that it can be transmuted into:
(1) Given a disease with extremely low fatality,
(2) And novel vaccines with limited efficacy,
(3) And alternatives to in-person contact,
(4) The government can destroy you if you refuse the vaccine.
Granted, this is like confronting a lynch mob with a legal brief. I may have the best argument in the world, and a list of authorities a mile long, but presenting it to them shows that I've misunderstood the nature of the encounter in a very fundamental way.
Still, to the extent they claim what they're doing is law, it's useful to point out that it's a façade.
boycott, divest, strike.... soon time for a general strike to oppose the dictators.... i already will nopt go to tsa, i will not do business with stores that mandate masks or vaxxes. i will do only emergency medicine since my hospital system mandated vaxxes.... stand up!
When you’re on your game, you’re terrific.
As many of us have said from the beginning, "your fear doesn't trump my rights" and "there is no pandemic exception to the Constitution."
I posted this definition of "sociopath" elsewhere. It seems apt:
Sociopath: “A personality disorder; chronic antisocial behavior and violation of the law; a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others; capable of violent acts without guilt feelings; manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others.”
Sound familiar?
Thanks to Maria Popova @brainpicker brainpickings.org for this brilliant piece which is particularly apropos in the current madness:
What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is. (In my own life, looking back on my ten most important learnings from the first ten years of Brain Pickings, I placed the practice of the small, mighty phrase “I don’t know” at the very top.) But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement — a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.”
That difficult feat of insurgency is what the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explored in 1996 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for capturing the transcendent fragility of the human experience in masterpieces like “Life-While-You-Wait” and “Possibilities.”
“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.””
Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In a sentiment of chilling prescience today, as we witness tyrants drunk on certainty drain the world of its essential inspiration, Szymborska considers the destructive counterpoint to this generative not-knowing:
“All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.”
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
Frederick Douglass
The madness of mass delusion. It’s as though the insane emperor without clothes discovered an ancient medical journal extolling the amazing health benefits of bloodletting and so decreed that everyone in the kingdom must have their blood let. Not only is everyone afraid to tell the emperor he has no clothes, but now they set about letting blood from every man, woman and child. No matter that the emperor is mad. No matter that bloodletting has long since been determined to be dangerously harmful rather than beneficial. No matter that those subjected to it are egregiously harmed. Bloodletting has been decreed for the health of all, so bloodlet we must. No one any longer bothers to ask why are we doing this? No one dares to question its wisdom. No none has the courage to say, “But we know this to be harmful. It makes no sense to bloodlet people.” This is partly what happens when critical thinking is no longer taught or even allowed in schools. “We are paid to bloodlet not to ask questions. Don’t confuse us with the facts. We have a job to do and we will not cease until we have let the blood of every single person.” The guards at Auschwitz had similar rationalizations. Now march!
I think I was on The Spectator UK below-the-line comments when I asked, "what is your first step for Totalitarianism?". Granted, I was mostly preaching to the choir there but there were a couple of lockdown fans there. Of course they had no answer. Some people really think one night they'll go to sleep in a perfectly functioning republic then overnight, a dictator will appear with tanks and troops goosestepping down the street.
btw I think many, many people would very happily clap if the govt decided to mandate forced cardio and healthy eating. many people around me would love dissenters having to do those things within the walls of a "special work camp"!
Bravo!
Spot on - this is the real game, the real battle. The armies of clowns are diversions.
So good. Excellent work.
Turns out the nightmare scenario of AI driving our lives, from cars to planes and everyday decisions, wondering how silicon circuits would end up solving the Trolley Problem at every instance, pales in comparison with the reality of Troll Politicians creating and worsening a problem AI would solve in a sec (without sacrificing our freedom).
Can anyone cite the study or studies used to satisfy Koch's postulate for sars cov 2? Has this thing been purified? I'm guessing that it hasn't, but maybe it has.
We are “entitled to make [our] own medical treatment decisions, and have a constitutional right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice." Not any more, you don't, says SCOTUS. We all just went from pseudo-citizens to digital slaves.
I love it when you're angry, hermano. On fire, here.
Meanwhile, I reckon you can stick a fork in the Nuremburg Convention, now, in the US. It is well and truly steamrollered: "After losing two rounds in lower federal courts, a group of Indiana University students challenging the school’s coronavirus vaccine were dealt a final blow Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the college’s vaccination requirement. In the first coronavirus vaccine mandate challenge of its kind before the nation’s highest court, the eight Indiana University (I.U.) students requested an emergency order, arguing that they are adults who are “entitled to make their own medical treatment decisions, and have a constitutional right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice in the context of a vaccination mandate.”
We live in a post-Constitutional, post-rule of law, post-free speech society. And not so much as a peep of protest or even dissent. As a society, we deserve what we get, I suppose.
"they are not even trying to make sense anymore. they are just trying to see what they can get away with."
Is it me or it started with the confinement of Wuhan? I remember telling a friend back in January 2020: "they cannot do that!"... It has been a while I stopped looking for logic and stopped thinking they cannot do anything absurd on the face of it!
Brillante artículo. Riguroso y lleno de pasión. We need a Bad Cat for president. You make me eager to fight