Before 2020, nobody even thought they’d be effective against viruses, two years later we have even more evidence that they don’t work, and yet public health authorities won’t stop promoting them.
Viral? Shit... I have another chapter and then need 2-3 days compile my thoughts. Did you read all three of Katherine Ebans pieces in Rolling Stone? Great complement to Chan/Ridley’s work.
Lab Leak. She’s done a fantastic job reporting on this the last 18 months. Very long pieces but well worth the read. (And I meant Vanity Fair, not Rolling Stone)
This is her latest, previous two are linked within.
Oh, the Vanity Fair piece! Yes, it's very good. Not much new for people who've been paying attention, but really well researched and being in that publication will probably minds the way no substack and blog posts, no matter how good they are, ever can... the sort of people who only trust one of the "real" magazines.
Australia’s Shari Markson also did a wonderful job in her book. This was against the zeitgeist in Australia to some extent - although Prime Minister did call for a serious investigation which raised the ire of China. That was the last sensible move - because Australia then became one of the most rigidly pro vax & restrictive country in the workd. This had staggered many Australians as much as it has shocked the rest of the world who thought they were easy going freedom lovers. That related to previous generations & is no longer true.
turns out they're easy going sheep with an easy indifference to the suffering of others - lindy chamberlain, david irving, boat people, julian assange, people beaten down and made to suffer by mask rubbish, thousands (yes, thousands) of Australians stranded abroad at immense cost to themselves .... and so on.
here's the TWIV interview with Daszak et al when they came back from their WHO trip to China. Daszak says they were not allowed into the lab but Shi Zhengli said she didn't work on Sars-CoV2 and he "believed her" which is really good scientific evidence if you ask me!
i really find this podcast unbearable. they are so smug and superior and really believe that they will save the world by making vaccines for every possible ailment and forcing them on us for our own good, of course
Read it and its depth, precision and balance reminded me of 35 years ago when I'd put my life on hold when the latest issue of Vanity Fair arrived in the mail.
Eugyppius - Have you come to the conclusion that all of this, the pandemic response, was not organic, not how things would play out if the governments motives were only about responding and dealing with a true pandemic?
Western nations have for several years been gaming out a pandemic response to a SARS like virus and yet when one hits their initial response is a non-response, down play it only to very quickly do a full 180. That alone is suspicious, once you add how they responded with each less lethal variant, doubling down on efforts to impose restrictions and mandates, just makes it look more dubious. I know many adhere to the philosophy of don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence however those same people also believe that any argument of a slipper slope is a fallacy despite the world bearing witness to slipper slopes playing out.
I believe they've been gaming a pandemic because they were expecting one but it wasn't covid. When covid struck someone realized it was an opportunity to do what they had been gaming for years and so they did a 180. Unfortunately for them coved was less lethal than what was needed but since they had already begun operations they had to market the virus to the public, convince the public it was worse than it really was. Once omicron struck it was no longer possible to keep the lie alive with the majority. When the variant of the virus became more effective than the vaccine but the governments kept acting like nothing had changed is when covid narrative collapse syndrome swept through the nations. True believers are still buying into the governments lies but the rest now see that at best it was greed and incompetence and at worse a nefarious effort to do things like a passport and tracking system that would not be doable expect during an emergency like this.
The mask is an effort to try and keep fear alive so as to justify retention of emergency powers as much as is possible. Not every state or nation will do this but those controlled by Authoritarians will.
Totally agree. We passed incompetence long ago, if it ever was. Going through Fauci's emails, we KNOW FOR SURE that he had all the 'correct' information, he simply ignored what wasn't politically convenient. That's why "The Science" has more closely followed political science this entire time.
Exactly. I believe those in power who are corrupt like for us to think its incompetence as that's less detrimental to them than if we believed it was malice and not incompetence. Most agree our system is full of corruption but many still refuse to believe it's anything more than corruption/greed that could be what is behinds what the elected officials and especially the unelected bureaucrats, that persist across multiple administrations from different parties, do.
I've always found it very strange how we don't see replacements for key/important unelected officials like the head of the various intel agencies and their key people when there is a change of which party has the white house. I can see these not changing when a Democrat president replaces an existing Democrat president but when the party changes why does the new president not replace these critical roles with new people? I'm confident that Trump didn't because of (intentional) bad advice from is dubious son-in-law who I believe is a member of the establishment. Trump isn't, he's a wild gun for the establishment hacks but no doubt that son-in-law of his is a full fledged member of the sell-outs.
I'm pulling out what's left of my hair. How can science be this utterly broken?
We had a hypothesis. We tested it. We tested a million billion times, in every country, in every cohort. Our hypothesis failed. It failed when we tried two masks. When we tried n95s. When we tried it at nursing homes. It failed, and failed, and failed.
But we became so in love with our hypothesis, and it became such an easy way to get published if we could data-drudge our way through some retrospective bullshit study, that we kept up this charade, and now have only the weight of a hundred ridiculous studies as "evidence".
Now half the world is convinced this useless intervention has value. Beyond the damage we are doing to toddlers, think of the long term implications? How many PhDs and MPHs are going to conduct research beginning with the premise "That masks work"? How much detriment will that have to future decades of research when we begin with a baked-in assumption that falsely describes viral behavior? How much damage would have been done if we clung to elevation correlating to Cholera for another 50 years after Snow demonstrated otherwise?
Everyone looks to John Snow as the hero of Epidemiology, but what we need is the next William Farr.
Who among the Public Health establishment will concede, just as William Farr had done 160 years ago, that their pet theory turned out to be completely wrong?
This nonsense needs to end. We knew for 100 years that masks didn't stop bacteria much less viruses. We knew through RCT even in the operating room they had no measurable impact on asepsis.
Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.
What do we need to do? Resurrect the James Randi 1 million dollar prize to challenge practitioners of this pseudoscience to prove their claims? Or would people like Gorski just claim they are "above" having to demonstrate their claims [1] and simply point to that time some people in a salon in Georgia who agreed to be tested didn't get Covid while wearing loose fitting cloth masks as his mic drop?
The public health establishment has been thoroughly Gish Galloped. They point to the 100+ "pro" IVM studies as example of how something false can be Gish Galloping, but refuse to realize they too have fallen for the same logical fallacy.
Social Media Archaeologists will someday find the primary source of how something that doesn't work got 70 studies to "show" it does work [2], but we can't wait for them to catch up.
I have taken that original collection of Gishes and added to it over the last 18 months, including every study, notable article, or Bill Nye TikTok into this spreadsheet. Now I need the next William Farr to take over and shut down this nonsense once and for all.
really great comment. every time some scientist or lauterbach-type figure starts talking about the ScIEnCE oF MaSKinG I feel much the same urge to tear out my beard. what science, what are they talking about? it feels like, whenever anybody invokes "science" these days, there is nothing so certain, as that whatever they're about to utter has nothing to do with "science" at all
They refer to all these new studies showing how masks stop droplets on a mannequin. High school science experiments which have no relationship to clinical Covid outcome. Here in US they simply disallow mention of the actual experiments run to try to prove mask validity. CDC puts up the weak, underpowered studies; excludes the better data. Simple, right!? And absolutely maddening as you say.
And they never seem to answer the next question: If the mask stops the infected droplet, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Because I'm pretty sure the answer to that is: the droplet evaporates and now the virus is airborne on your next exhale.
Edit: Remember the CDC pointing to the Kansas study? What a joke that was.
2) Micropore on N95 is 8 microns. That means roughly 5,000 virions side by side can pass through n95 micropore at once. Running that math for surgical (80 microns) or cloth (100-500 microns) we are now at 500K - 30 million virions side-by-side through hole.
3) I still haven't seen the evidence they are only attached to water vapor and not freely floating (I might be completely wrong). How big then are the water droplets? For decades we said >5 microns, but science agreed that was wrong (yet still clung even harder to Maskology for some reason - honestly I thought this was the end of the religion) [1]
4) How many virions emitted per breath for "x" activity. Does anyone know? I have studies suggesting as little as 1,000 per breath and as many as 1 million.
5) How many virions does it take to cause infection? Does anyone know? I have studies suggesting as few as 10 and as many as 100.
6) Run #4 and #5 through a 95% filter. Does it even matter anymore? would a 99% filter matter? Would you trust a cloth, surgical, or n95 around anthrax? Pepper spray even?
7) Air flows through path of least resistance. I absolutely agree with Denise Dewald that you need to be using surgical tape to seal your N95 to a clean shaven face (you have to look her up on Twitter if you aren't familiar, most consider her the final boss of Mask Cult, but I have a suspicion she is a deep-fake-Andy Kaufman-esque parody account who is even more committed to her illusion than Alfred Borden)
8) What happens to the fraction of viruses that don't get sucked through the micropores or sides/top/bottom of the masks? Is the mask some sort of bug zapper? No. Every breath would logically break them free and nebulize them. It's ridiculous to even have to explain this. Where did they think they went? The Mask Elf collects them?
How can these people be so stupid? For fucks-sake we only discovered viruses because something kept passing through our CERAMIC filters when Pasteur and company were trying to isolate bacteria. Try breathing through a ceramic sealed mask and know that viruses would STILL get through.
aha.. that's a good one. powerful one. virus passes through ceramic filters. there's a meme. thank you for that. I can use it.
there's another point I always try to make, too: masking isn't a thing it's a process and must be performed correctly at the right time in the right context.
The effectiveness of the whole process can be destroyed by one false move. It's always been thus with filtering.
If they tried masking against mustard gas they'd soon find out. A couple of marines voluntary subjected themselves to such a test. On youtube somewhere.
p.s.
anyone got a link to anything about that process it would be good....
p.p.s. I googled and found a good hit straight away. Household ceramic pot filters are very effective against microbes but very poorly effective against virus. Whole swag of papers can be downloaded there in on hit;
Another way to have the same effect as the mannequin study is to refrain from coughing or spitting in someone's face. Good 'ol common sense and manners will stop droplets, too.
But neither masks nor etiquette will stop aerosol transmission.
Yes!! Mind our manners - like grandma taught or Dr. Roger Hodkinson railed about. If you are unwell, stay home and get back to life once you are better!
It's one of the great mysteries that the biggest paddlers of Corona mandates are also pimps for climate change yet not a single word about how masks have ruined the environment. On my lawn alone I've picked up at least a dozen masks in the past few months. Now extrapolate this anecdote across the West and it's easy to see the colossal problem this has caused. And yes, ingesting all these microfibres will also come with its own set of consequences. But hey, will the astrologer-scienticians connect it? Probably not. All we'll get is 'we needed to to do it' or some invocation of plausible deniability.
I should add about the apparent shift towards masks. It was all more or less in unison. Once one started, everyone jumped on it. It's almost as if - it feels like anyway - someone made a call to health officials and said, 'No, masks 'work'. /wink. We're gonna need you to go ahead and push masks and fill out those TPS reports'. Not to sound too conspiratorial but there had to be some behind the scenes decision.
Nearly every physician in the West is a member of a professional society that issues periodical updates instructing them what to think and do. Mine come from the College of American Pathologists, and my wife gets them from the American Academy of Family Physicians. Brought to you by Pfizer, or Merck, or A-Z.... You get the picture. I am confident in my wild guess that public health officials, hospital administrators and healthcare institution IT directors get similar updates.
Yes. Luckily there is a plus side too: a lot less petrol was burned, a lot less takeaway coffee cups were consumed, and so on as people worked from home.
I think there's a basic error, a presumption that others cogitate on the same level, in the same way you do yourself.
My suspicion is that the masses simply think like this:
. they must do SOME good. (irrefutable. something must be stopped)
. everyone else is doing it - the mass knows better than I.
. the govt demands it and I lose hundreds of dollars or more if I'm caught without.
. rather be safe than sorry
. it's not such a hassle anyway while we wait for it all to go away
. all the govts in the world are doing it
. even the Presidents do it even out in the open on airfields
. those rich powerful people wouldn't do it for nothing.
Get it? That comfortably covers the whole experience for them.
I don't know what you call that kind of reasoning and I'm no social scientist or whatever you'd 'need' to be to analyse and categorise it.
But I'm enough of an experienced human being to know that it is a pretty fair representation of the thought processes of the individuals of the mob.
And if you look at that list of 'reasonings' you see that nothing we say properly addresses any of it.
And add to that the fact that 'we' don't figure in their world. They don't see us. They don't hear from us. They never see our charts or our data, never read threads or articles like this.
They swim in a sea of govt propaganda 100%.
Where I live the only counter propaganda I have ever seen was pasted up on walls by myself. Pictures of charts and later QI codes linking to powerful evidence.
In two years. And they were always gone the following day.
Doctors consult with patients and wear masks as they do it.
Doctors are forbidden to even express an opinion whilst wearing that mask that it might be contrary to logic and/or science or that they personally might disagree.
That's how totalitarian our society IS. Not dreaming. Not exaggerating. Not alarmist. Fact: IS.
So don't tear you hair out wondering how they can be like this. Not if I'm correct in my observations at all. It is perfectly natural for them to be like this.
You know what? The hair tearing unnatural is the total lack of any counter propaganda from us. Like me. I gave up. I put up no more posters, manufacture no more QI codes, never try to explain anything to anyone.
The doctors, the medical profession generally has initiated no anonymous, pervasive very clever and powerful counter narrative.... their silence is the silence not even of those thoroughly cowed emitting the occasional scream of pain.. no, it is the silence of those totally, calmly, in accord.
Our legal profession says nothing of the misuse of emergency powers.
Our human rights big mouths usually so strident and demanding this and that (including public funds for themselves) are silent, totally silent.
Our 'opposition party' politicians say nothing at all - they do not object to repeated regular impositions of nonsensical 'States of Emergency'.
The Main Stream Media.... well, we all know...
Now all of they - and more, I don't think I covered all - by rights belong to 'us'. The knowledgeable, the enlightened, the knowing, the deliberately 'knowing', the people who take an interest in the wider world, the state of the nation, the philosophy of society and health and science itself.
It is 'us' who are at fault. Yes. If you mean tear you hair out because of 'us' then yes. For sure.
But everything I ever see and read is metaphorically tearing its hair out because of the mass, the mob, the 'sheeple' etc.
But they're not the problem. Physician heal thyself. It's us is the problem. 'Us'.
I agree. Where I live until recently, the only sign of resistance were little stickers that a group called the white rose put up on lamp posts with messages like "you are being lied to", You comply because you want it to end. Because you comply it will never end" etc. They all got ripped down very quickly. Most people get all their news and information from msm which were all on message. I think they started with the mask thing pre vax just so they could say they were doing something to be honest. When the protest happened at parliament the negative press was awful. Not one member of parliament would talk to us. We were described as the 'river of filth'. But it did make a difference. I'm back at work now and everyone is being as obedient to the new rules as to the old. A few mutterings about me being there (not yet in the office) but I've made it clear that I am not wearing a mask.
Yes I saw maybe three white rose stickers, is all. I tried to trace the group and all I could find related to some English group.
It is pretty hopeless. I have a site: covidhonesty.com and I plan to continue it and work on it and categorise, sort out the links, gradually build it up to something that is a rock solid repository of rock solid truth regarding all this.
I think its not a group as such but people all over just buying a printer that can produce the stickers and away they go. I'd a quick look at your site, well done. It is NOT hopeless.
There's apparently a couple of groups by that name that don't appear to be too good - not really into covid truth.
I had been thinking to join their effort - do as you say, copy the template, print and post. But after finding that out I think I'll continue with my own home grown QR posts and such.
I agree… I think governments had to feel and be seen to do something rather than nothing as well….I know an OIA was done on mask use when it was first mandated in NZ for public transport. We had no cases at the time due to shutting off from the world….the official response was to ‘remind people of the risk’. I see Philadelphia is reintroducing them today! I get so depressed over this some days and the lack of logic!
I've just lived through the hardest winter of my life, thanks to the German Angst and the population-wide vaccine mandate that they almost imposed on us.
I'm currently avoid all still conforming colleagues, friends and family members. I make it a requirement not to speak about corona or vaccines when going out to dinner, or say "we need to change the topic" if it crops up at other occasions. I brightly smile at my still mask-wearing, though not required, highly educated colleagues and mentally add them to my definitely boosted list. Maybe one day they will figure it out for themselves. Maybe not. I don't try to convince anyone anymore, I wasted a lot of energy on this previously.
Exactly. I think we all understand how you feel and feel the same way. It's very easy to feel it is all hopeless. But I guess it is not. Things change, turn around, eventually, always I think.
I was thinking of cards today. You know how you carry a card with your name, business, number on it? Or tradesmen and such do anyway.
Well I was thinking of having some of them made up. But no name, address, number, business. Just a QI code. Or QR - I find now they are called QR codes and only a few refer to them as QI. Well QR codes.
Carry some of those little 'calling cards' or whatever they're called and have printed on them a couple or more QR codes that link direct to some really telling, dramatic facts.
Like a prominent simple chart maybe of deathrates in adjoining states of the USA both following exactly the same curve but one State with draconian lockdowns and masks and the other without.
Or maybe to a telling video by some 'to the point' and easy to take speaker like Ivor Cumming's presentations he used to put out, or maybe Chris Martensen.
Or perhaps just to a page promoting the book: 'Unmasked'
Or whatever.
Whatever I can find that I reckon would have the greatest impact in the shortest time, to get into them, plant something in their brains, catch their attention for a minute.
Perhaps we should assemble a list of what links people think would fit that bill best.
And then we could all do that same thing.
No arguing necessary. Not pasting on posts or walls. Nothing dramatic. No drama. We could even just leave them on shop counters, in libraries, anywhere and everywhere.
People will point their phones at them out of curiosity...
I think I could get into the habit of that and get to enjoy finding better and better links to QR. :)
Think that's a good idea and want to suggest something you can write to 'truth' at that address - covidhonesty.com
I think taking responsibility is smart. I let myself be goaded into quiet at first about the masks; my wife didn’t want me to make waves. Eventually I became very vocal and spoke out against the masks in schools or public places and helped our local county to rescind mask mandate at her county level. But the people we are up against don’t care what we say. They rely on the shoddy “science” and ad hominem attacks agains us, or anyone who thinks to show them otherwise. The only way is to change the education methods in the developed world. There is a reason it is compulsory and controlled by the State in so many places...
I can't stress enough that I suspect our largest problem is the "A-B-P" problem of academia. Always. Be. Publishing.
Suddenly we gave all these PhDs the EASIEST way to get published - write about masks. It has to be pro mask of course, else you have to beg for publication like Danmask study... but if you can p-hack, data drudge, or provide some statistically insignificant signal that Masks made some marginal benefit, BOOM! You are published! I am deeply familiar with the 280 entries on my list and so many are just hilariously bad I sometimes wonder if this is just some huge experiment on gullibility (*Chef's kiss* to Kristin Andrejko's study #264).
In the US, suddenly in June of 2020, the 4th study in that list "Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19" (Zhang et al), became the most cited article in history of PNAS, and was used as the hyperlink to the liturgical responsorial hymn "Which we know work" whenever the holy word of "Masks" was invoked by the press. The retraction request was of course ignored by that same set of journalists [1], as was the obviousness of how easily the results could be manipulated if you were remotely familiar with regression [2]
But this marked an important milestone in The Science - nonsense was now valued and could be the fastest way to getting published. I have no idea how many thousands of attempts to demonstrate efficacy had to be "file drawered" before they could come up with hard hitters like "Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in Kansas". The Gold Rush began.
By November 2020 Social Media Personality Katelyn Jetelina aka "Your Local Epidemiologist" created the Facebook post [3] which I used as template for my expanded collection. In the US, that post became the universal "mic drop" anytime someone would question the efficacy. All you had to do was share that post, and suddenly The Science was settled. It's hilarious by hindsight reading her summary of the studies.
I would love to re-write a few of these and replace "mask" with "Ivermectin", and watch academics suddenly become interested in high quality data, RCT, and the dangers of promoting relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.
Imagine if we took the results of the Bangladesh mask study as template - suppose I said "I went to a village (n=16,032), told them how dangerous covid was, told them to be careful, then gave them some IVM tabs, then compared to a 'do nothing' village (n=14,678). After intervention we had only 111 villagers get Covid in the IVM village compared to a whopping 1,12 out the control group! Amazing, right...??"
"Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans." I find this sentence infuriating. As an independent (a Democrat long ago), I find the Democrats practically delusional and incredibly destructive, so I would never vote for one. But I also find the bizarre hatred of the "other side" even worse. I don't care who says something -- Republican, Democrat, Whig, whatever. If COMMUNIST proved that masks didn't work, I'd believe him. If someone who wanted to restore the monarchy of France proved it, I'd believe it. It's either right or it's wrong. The same people (I'm talking to YOU, Kamala Harris) who said they wouldn't trust a vaccine if Trump came up with it are afraid not to wear masks because they might look like Republicans to their fellows. Everyone has gone stark, raving mad. There are FACTS.
Yes, the truth is the truth. Just because someone doesn't like the person telling the truth doesn't make it not the truth. But humans believe otherwise because of "feelings."
'Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.'
I'm not a single issue voter. As a longtime liberal, I have nevertheless come around to appreciating the stand of many Republicans on Covid measures. But I still really dislike other things they support. Please note, I've also come to dislike a lot of Democratic positions. Right now I'm at the point of saying 'a pox on both your houses'.
It was Democrats who excoriated the unvaccinated and denied them basic human freedoms. They are the party of Davos, domestically concerned only with advancing the causes of various sexual curiosities. As a former loyal Democrat, I will never, ever, under any circumstances vote for a Democrat again.
Wish I could get a refund for my campaign contributions made over the years.
It would be so great if the Republicans were actually the solution to the problem. Of course, they're not, and you're right. DeSantis has done mostly the right things because Floridians wouldn't have stood for any more crap. Ron Johnson has done some important work exposing Pfizer's treachery. No other Republican has done anything other than empty grandstanding and fundraising.
Don't blame me. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Imagining the universe in which he won is almost enough to make me cry.
It is a terrible system, but it's so entrenched that it is nearly impossible to start a third party (and have it amount to anything) or to go without one as a true independent. Both parties are compromised by the globalists, but their hold on one of the two is more shaky than on the other.
Yes I know. I sympathise. It is the same in Australia. They're always trying to start new parties and they never do any good. OR - you could say they do much good, if you want to think along certain lines, for oft times they have held 'the balance of power' and govts find themselves having to do deals with these minority parties to get the programmes through.
There's one now that I've joined: Clive Palmer's 'United Australia Party' I think it's called.
I joined it in order to add my tiny bit of weight to the notion that we should NOT return any of the existing politicians. None of them. In govt. or in opposition. For they have all been extraordinarily and inexcusably malfeasant, to this very day. With one or two individual exceptions, I should admit.
But I haven't joined it because I think it will ever form a government. It may get to that holding the balance of power position I suppose but even that's doubtful for I think the future is perhaps something more like is the Indian model? - where there's so many parties that all governments are coalitions and deals are the order of the day?
My thought is that it is all anachronistic today. With the internet and smartphones we're all part of the one incredibly swift and knowledgeable machine which could be polling all of us on a continuing basis more or less and discovering our wishes on every little thing that comes up.
Like if I had my own account the same as I have my own bank account I could have my position on certain things tabulated on it, like in a spreadsheet.
No need for me to vote every four years. My voting desire is there always available for anyone ( or for privacy just the govt. or the govt machine) to view and take note of, add to the numbers.
Given that I can change it at any time at all.
Or if I'm not interested in taking any notice of what government does - as this covid thing indicates something like 80% of the population are not - then my choice can just sit there unchanged through the years.
And other columns of this 'spreadsheet' could flag my wishes of various issues of the day.
Instant referendum. Instant polling. Instant feedback from the population.
This would be a thousand fold closer approach to the idea of democracy than anything we have right now.
Govts are frightened of it for whatever reason - loss of autonomous ability to declare states of emergency, adopt emergency powers, rape the country and imprison the inhabitants would seem a good possibility after what we've seen, learned. And they put up objections like - the last reply I got - 'security considerations'. Suggesting what? That my bank account security is no good? Or they couldn't implement that level of security?
Suggesting to me they're liars as usual, hiding something.
So they won't implement it.
And some don't like the idea for they fear it'd be too easy for the meatheads or whatever to speak up and influence everything. But that's democracy, dude, that's what we've opted for.
And I frankly don't think it's any danger at all.
So that's where I think we should go.
And failing the ability to go there I think we should do the next best thing:
Pretend your local and federal elected reps ARE your own 'account' in this system I've described and treat them that way. Keep signalling your likes and dislikes, decisions and indecisions to them.
No. The "bad team" DID have evidence to back it up - the same evidence Eugyppius wrote about at the beginning of this post. It was well known -- not with Covid, specifically, but with airborne respiratory viruses.
The "bad team" didn't approach this from an evidence-based approach. Rather, they tried treating masks as a personal choice, confronting it from a libertarian argument rather than a scientific one. This allowed the Public Health Idiots to conflate it with Seat Belts (one of the dumbest analogies out there), indicating that both sides agree they work, they only disagreed if the choice to wear them should reside with the State or the Individual.
Politicians across the board on the Bad Team didn't have the intelligence, balls, or whatever to draw a line in the sand that they simply don't work. At all. DeSantis got closer recently with his evisceration of the high schools kids participating the in the theater, so that was nice.
The irony of the YLE Viral Post [1] is that 50 of her 85 Gish Gallopped studies she flaunts were published between 2003-2019.
Think about that.
The Maskologists have proof masks work, going back to 2003. So I wonder, are the 20,000,000 flu deaths in those 18 years on their hands? What about the 30,000,000 Tuberculosis deaths in that time frame. Are they accountable for those too?
I mean, they apparently had all this fantastic knowledge and they chose to sit on it? They could have saved close to 50,000,000 people!
The libertarian approach 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 have been the slam-dunk rebuttal to Covidism in any country that values liberty, as one would expect to be the case in the so-called "land of the free." Whether draconian violations of civil rights had the desired effect upon the problem or not is, in many ways, beside the point... these measures would never be seriously considered in a free society, and the sole purpose of the American government is to ensure that we do, in fact, live in a free society. It's not to ensure our safety or keep us healthy. It's to keep us free. And it has failed miserably.
When we didn't know how deadly Covid was or wasn't, it made sense to keep people from spreading it by being stupid and selfish--I don't care whether you're a libertarian, Typhoid Mary had no right to deliver milk and infect people just because SHE didn't get typhoid and didn't believe it could be spread by someone with no symptoms. But once it became clear that it was deadly, but mostly to certain groups, these emergency, just-in-case measures for everyone should have been dropped at once. They weren't because politicians are not particularly bright, and it's hard to tell terrified people that there's nothing to be afraid of. In general, they won't believe you -- especially when they are being told by others that they are all in danger of dying and/or that their being careless could kill someone else.
The absolute nonsense of restaurants full of people sitting at tables unmasked but putting on masks to walk to the bathroom, or people on planes wearing masks when it became clear that they were NOT spreading Covid by flying, or CHILDREN wearing masks in American schools... none of that had anything to do with reason or health. But I argued with a school board member about it -- he told me in no uncertain terms that children were at GREAT risk, and didn't care what evidence I had. He actually told me "you and I live in different worlds." I told him I lived in the one with facts and evidence. But did that matter? NO. Once fear takes hold, fear wins.
I agree that the politicians and activists did this. But activists always boil things down to slogans, and the politicians on both sides said nonsense. The evidence was always ALL on the side of masks not working. It was not secret or weird, obscure information -- it was what anyone would find in all the public health and medical literature. That's what I meant. Whatever nonsense an activist or politician spewed, there was evidence to back up the claim that masks would not help, and none to back up the claim that masks prevent Covid. Remember the idiotic chart that showed people PEEING in each other? That was the "masks work" science.
It is a common (false) narrative that early and persistent skeptics "got lucky" or that their criticism was rooted entirely in their selfish or antisocial goals rather than in response to the facts.
What's interesting about these objections, when they arise, is that they are tacitly admitting fault but defending their positions on the grounds that their opponents (us) arrived at our conclusions "the wrong way."
I used to get that shit a lot in school. This was years before common core, where you basically have to be a robot who can spout progressive propaganda at grade level.
I’m sure it was from spike shedding from the vaccinated. I’m determined to blame it on the vaccines. 😂 but you just want to blame the teenager, always blaming the teenager.
(Sorry, this whole business has me and us too serious sometimes, we occasionally need a good laugh).
Consider how Ancel Keys' fraudulent behavior distorted dietary science for the better part of 60 years. That was just one bogus study (his cherry picking did uncover high cardiac rates for countries with heavy margarine consumption) and we are still trying to unwind the myths surrounding dietary fat/cholesterol.
With lots of help from pharma. What would we do without statins? The "OG" of efficacy trials. Lower frequency of non-fatal heart attacks in the treatment group but higher all cause mortality than in the control group. Sound familiar?
Yes. Look up the work of cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in the UK. He's got lots to say on this, in a pretty accessible way. (And he's also been ringing the alarm about vaccine-induced myocarditis).
Wow! Guess what? I suffered from nearly all the side effects mentioned! Even with other factors at play, this couldn't be all a coincidence! I started taking them to keep healthy with a history of stroke in my family about 18 years ago. Feeling much better now. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.
Well it's been broken for a long time. Those of us who participated in the debunking of the "hole in the ozone layer" fraud of the 90s, or the vastly larger ongoing fraud of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, have been all too aware of the failure of science to avoid the fate of the humanities as they fell to the forces of leftism.
It's never too late. There's always hope. Reject leftist ideology.
Hi Michael - this is a fantastic list. A quick question: in these types of lists I rarely see Neil Orr's 1981 study included. I realize it is in a surgical environment, but it's 40 years old, short (~2 pgs), conclusive, and written simply enough to be well-understood by laymen. Is there a reason it's not included? This was the first mask study that came to my attention in Feb 2020 and had profound effect on my personal behavior and attitudes over the last 2 years.
To be clear, I'm not criticizing that you haven't listed one small study from 40 years ago; I'm wondering if you're aware of it and if there's a reason why I can't recall it ever having been mentioned in these type communities. Perhaps there's something methodologically wrong with it? Best I can tell, it might be dismissed for small sample size, but I'm not sophisticated enough to conclude that.
Thanks, it is an ever growing list, so will add this to my collection. I intend to include everything I can find, no matter how old, how high or low of quality. I have roughly 50 in queue (separate private tab) I haven't read through yet which will eventually be added. Not included in this shared version are my notes for each entry. I just wanted a reference point so anytime some smug idiot tried to discuss the latest results from "Maricopa and Pima counties" or some other CDC nonsense I'd be able to Matt Damon his ass.
Just checked, I did have it in my unread queue, as it was sourced in "Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: A controlled study" from 1991 (#125), I just hadn't gone through all the references in detail yet, but Orr was in there. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply. Again, this one might be low-quality as it specifically deals with wound infection in surgical setting, and bacterial infection at that. I found it compelling, but perhaps that's my ignorance. Cheers!
Paraphrasing someone I read a few years back: Science is fragile. In a fight between science and Power science will always lose. Therefore to survive it must be separated from the State.
I hadn't revisited Your Local Epidemiologist's Mask Thread in quite some time until today. Man those comments are gold. This was most recent one. Imagine still believing in this nonsense by August 2021:
I spent my working career at a large semiconductor manufacturer in the US,
working in the “yield” team. Our everyday mission was to get more and more of the chips we made to work ( those that are faulty get tossed AFTER money and time is spent making them). It was routine for me to have to remind other engineers that “the data needed to influence opinion” and not the other way around. Engineers, mind you.
Science doesn't break, people break. Science isn't a thing, it's a process. The problem is people who claim to use scientific methods were corrupted by their politics, and people who should have recognized their corruption did not, some because they are also corrupt, most because they just don't know any better. The failed education system has undermined scientific knowledge and critical thinking for several generations. Many people recognized the corruption and the deception early in this disaster, but still suffered the companion failure of education -- the unwillingness to stand for their convictions, or even to have any. Tolerance trumps principles every time.
We have met the enemy and he is us. Blaming "science" for our own failures is just another copout. The question now is what will we do about it. More of the same, apparently.
Yes and it never finds 'the truth'. It finds little 'apparent truths' along the way. Even those colossi: relativity and quantum mechanics are known to be 'apparent truths'.
Science often finds the truth. It's how we've made as much progress as we have. It sometimes confirms what is not true, as Alexander G Bell and many others have done, repeatedly. Learning what doesn't work is sometimes as important as finding what does work. The problem we have seen lately is people who haven't proven anything claiming we should accept what they say because ... science. Sure sign of fraud.
Great list - we will cross-reference this to what we have listed on our comprehensive mask report - currently at over 100 studies/articles. https://c19science.info/COVID-19_Masks.pdf
In the multiverse, somewhere there is a world where Trump, being a noted germaphobe, immediately started wearing a mask February of 2020 and the media reminded everyone that masks don’t work and how stupid Trump is for believing such silly nonsense.
But he caved to the narrative and hid behind states rights. He should have led from the beginning, stated the science against masks and lockdowns, and punished states that violated our rights. And fired Fauci and Birx.
I agree he should have stated the science against masks and lockdowns, but states' rights are the Constitutionally correct position for the president. Imagine if everybody in the country had been forced to use the NY protocol of infecting all the at-risk at once by throwing covid patients into nursing homes and then killing them on vents they don't need.
christ almighty. i'm an outside observer of your scene. in Aus. from what I saw Trump had almost no chance of stating anything at any time. as I remember it even the republicans were not on Trump's side. In my life (well over half a century) I've never seen such a concerted and ubiquitous and vicious attack on a public figure never mind a president.
4. Doing something. Anything. "Out of an abundance of caution." It seems for many the mask is a reflexive response to a vague sense of "Covid is out there." To not demand or wear it is to stop worrying about Covid. This is related to making Corona visible, but for the mask-lovers, it is also about holding on to a particular experience of being the smart and cautious ones who are "doing everything right."
But even if "covid is out there," so are colds, flu, bronchitis, etc., and yet we never felt such a need to "do something" so drastic and at the same time so useless. The goal was to CAUSE fear, not assuage it.
And people still cling to their masks. I was just told by someone if I want to attend their religious service I should wear a mask. I politely said no thank you. Guess I’ll just keep praying and talking to God from home. I asked. Why doesn’t your congregation follow the science? No reply.
Our church for at least the last year has said masks are optional. And I would probably stop attending there if the leadership went in the opposite direction and made it mandatory.
Alex Berenson’s book has a section on it. Masks were totally a psyops. Imposed. BY SAGE. An organization in London that advised such things. Intended to get us all to comply and to empower peers to yell at us all. And to encourage fear.
As I think I recall, the original stated purpose of masks was as the first rung on a compliance ladder, to make it more likely that people followed other restrictions too.
Of course, as with all things, it took on a life of its own and became something to be done just for its own sake.
I always thought it was because they realized they needed to give people some sense of control, something they could DO in the face of so much Terror and Uncertainty. It would deflect the crazy energy from themselves and what was going on. I still think this was true in the beginning, and they can't admit it. Think basic Psy-ops.
Yep. They already admitted they lied about masks to nudge behavior once. They would think nothing of doing it again in order to get people back into the economy.
Once? Many top covidians have said so several times if one pays attention at all. How many times did we hear “a sign of respect”? Signs of respect have nothing to do with medical science, but with behavioral manipulation.
If it is a sign of respect, that means that being forced to wear one is a violation of my first amendment right to free expression. I can't be forced to make a statement of respect any more than I can be forced not to.
At this point, I believe our public health authorities have bad intentions / don’t have our best interest at heart.
I am more curious why the people are still following along.
Some of my potential reasons include:
Fear (thanks to the media and NO thanks to the vaccine): 41% of Democrats thought more than half of people with COVID-19 must be hospitalized. In reality, only 1-5% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 will be hospitalized… if the virus really was that deadly I MAY understand the masks
“For others” / Social Responsibility / Feel Morally-Superior: Public health officials discovered a really good marketing strategy. Their ads are designed to make you feel like a horrible person for NOT wearing a mask, while making the people wearing a mask feel like they are better than / care more about / are saving others when they wear a mask
Don’t want to be labeled conservative: After my college friends got vaccinated, and the CDC granted them permission to be maskless, they had a dilemma: they wanted to be maskless because they wanted people to know they were vaccinated, but they also did not want to be maskless because they didn’t want to be mistaken for an anti-masker, a.k.a. Trump Supporter. Ultimately, they chose (and still choose) to wear a mask. It’s so unfortunate that a piece of cloth became political.
Your #2 & #3 clearly were major reasons, I but I believe the forced wearing of masks was mostly to make people more susceptible to illness due to hypoxia and the suppression of immune system health, with the goal of boosting the infection numbers to maintain the fear and mass psychosis. Furthermore, masks are akin to a muzzle on a dog, to keep it controlled. Ergo, anyone not wearing one, is a defacto homicidal maniac, and must be exorcised from the "in" group, if not jailed. This was also to maintain the fear-based mass psychosis, and keep people suspicious of eachother, which is deleterious to community harmony. It all worked quite well for a while and still is to some extent. Now, its really all just about placating a few brainwashed covidiot holdouts, and the authorities sick enjoyment they get from exercising idiotic and arbitrary rules over their inferiors, primarily for their amusement. Keep your slaves scared, sick, and poor, and they will never revolt or leave the plantation, comrade...
To follow onto my comment, I also believe the maintenance of fear through masking was extended to enhance acceptance of vaccination. Note that the promise was that if you get vaccinated, they would not continue to force masking. So that was used as the carrot. Then it was "get the jab or lose your job" (i.e. the stick). Then when it was clear that vaccines and masks didn't work, it has been all about reminding us plebs that we are subject to their authority and amusement.
I have read reports that normally lively high school halls, full of students talking and goofing around, are sullen, depressing, dull places when the students are forced into their muzzles. They don't have the spark... it's just a bunch of automatons shuffling from one class to the next like broken-spirit lovestock.
This is part of why I've wondered about places like Disneyland requiring masks. Who would go to an amusement park muzzled? It seems self-evident that it's impossible to have fun that way. I don't see how it's possible to do anything but obsess on the misfortune and injustice of being muzzled. I would not be able to enjoy anything, let alone concentrate on anything and perform useful work of any kind.
Then I read about young people who have not just adapted to their fetters, but who have come to prefer them, and that makes no sense at all to me. I know about Stockholm syndrome, and I have seen the anecdotes about circus elephants becoming agitated and upset if they are freed from their chains, but surely young and vital teens and 20-somethings would not be so dead inside to be like those pachyderms who abandoned any hope long ago, would they?
yes I recently saw something that maintained that the WHO recommended minimum oxygen levels for workers is 19.5% if I remember right. And the article claimed that oxygen levels fall below this within a couple of minutes of donning a mask.
But I don't seem able to find it again. And in searching I keep running across studies etc. claiming masks have absolutely no deleterious effects at all.
They rob humans of natural humanity right there before you get into anything else so that's rubbish, I know. But more on the oxygen thing I can't find right now.
As recently as 2019, less than three years ago, just months before masks were mandated masks were banned outright on public transportation. For good reasons upheld by international courts. Do those rational and legal justifications for banning them not apply today?
2014
"Judges at the European court of human rights (ECHR) have upheld France's burqa ban, accepting Paris's argument that it encouraged citizens to "live together".
The law, introduced in 2010, makes it illegal for anyone to cover their face in a public place...the law was not aimed at the burqa or veil but any covering of the face in a public place...
...The European judges decided...that the preservation of a certain idea of "living together" was the "legitimate aim" of the French authorities.
Isabelle Niedlispacher, representing the Belgian government, which introduced a similar ban in 2011 and which was party to the French defence, declared both the burqa and niqab "incompatible" with the rule of law.
Aside from questions of security and equality, she added: "It's about social communication, the right to interact with someone by looking them in the face and about not disappearing under a piece of clothing."
The French and Belgian laws were aimed at "helping everyone to integrate", Niedlispacher added."
"On August 1, 2019, the “Act Partially Prohibiting Face-Covering Clothing,”also known as the “Burqa Ban,” entered into force in the Netherlands. The Act prohibits the wearing of clothing that completely or partially conceals the face in spaces where people are expected to communicate with each other. Thus, face-covering clothing is banned on public transportation and in educational, governmental, and nursing care institutions, but is still allowed in such public spaces as on train platforms. The ban applies to burqas, niqabs, full-face helmets, balaclavas, and masks, but not to headscarves."
Until facial coverings are banned outright the manipulated and coerced psychosis that has taken hold of our society will remain. Faces are necessary, are a requirement for public life, for civil society. The rationale that international courts found true just before Covid still applies. It never stopped applying.
"This is because SARS-2 is primarily transmitted aerosols; it works like a gas that fills indoor spaces. Only N95 or FFP2 respirators have any chance of stopping the inhalation of these microscopic particles" - and unless you also wear a mask to protect your eyes the infection can atack through that method - your mucous membranes - this was also well know at the time.
Last summer when the CDC said that vaxxed people could go maskless, nearly everybody around here did so. The few people who were still wearing masks were VERY VERY uncomfortable being the ones standing out.
At some point, the 'go along' people will see that to go along, they need to ditch the masks. Once they do that, the 'true believers' will suffer the consequences of their actions. My guess is they will submit much quicker than we did. ;)
Masks amplify fear. Here's the science behind them, psychological. More precisely, behavioral science. Not medical science. Social sciences, not natural sciences. Our self-proclaimed betters use behaviorism to "fix" our ignorant, flawed perspectives - to protect us, of course, for our own good. These manipulators of the mind don white robes and stethoscopes masquerading as hard scientists who follow the scientific method of the natural world. This is the actual science of it. Some call it fear amplification as non pharmaceutical intervention. I call it compulsory terrorism.
This study gets into the scientific background on the importance of faces, visible expressions, for a healthy society and healthy social interactions. A 2009 research study titled, "Of snakes and faces: An evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear." This study supports the very same rationale the international courts upheld the burqa bans for. A healthy society requires faces be seen. Not just eyes. Full facial expressions are an essential form of human communication and stabilizes society. And perhaps most importantly, human aggression is moderated by full faces.
In the study they refer to masked faces. Not in terms of an actual facial covering, but in terms of unnatural neutral faces that intentionally don't communicate any emotion in situations when facial expressions are customary and expected. Point is, yes, they've terrorized us no differently than if they've made us look at snakes all around us all day, every day. It takes constant higher reasoning reminders to self to push through the fear and anxiety masked faces creates just as surely as if surrounded by snakes all the time, even at an subconscious level.
Very interesting. A friend who had a violent childhood has spoken about how seeing masked men especially if wearing black masks with a head covering was very frightening and threatening to her. Maybe she's not the only one!
Pretty amazing how a research study on masked faces confirms what everyone knew from common sense prior to 2020. Masked person in a bank - frightening and terrifying. Masked person on a plane - frightening and terrifying. Masked person on subway - frightening and terrifying. Masked person approaches in a parking lot - frightening and terrifying. Masked intruder in your house - frightening and terrifying.
Who'd have ever thought masks evoked fear without a research study? Or that epidemiologists using the behavioral science techniques and tools they study in order to change public behavior during a pandemic would recommend masks to amplify the public's perception of fear of other people so the unsophisticated masses would stay away from each other (falsely) believing they are reducing transmission rates.
Fear was chosen as primary non pharmaceutical intervention public policy. Masked faces scream fear more effectively than any other symbol. A universal symbol of fear. And submission. The perfect prerequisites for the imposition of authoritarianism. What FDR cautioned a frightened nation to not succumb to as totalitarianism was sweeping the globe, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Instead, the leaders we suffer today demand we be fearful and enlist each of us to spread fear. Fully aware of how fear gives them license to impose authoritarianism, that people willingly embrace authority when made fearful. Which tells us everything we need to know about the intentions of the leaders we suffer today. Authoritarianism is their objective. Manufacturing the consent of free people to become subjects to their rule. Willingly. Psychological manipulation. Though it's no more willing than those who are coerced into signing contracts against their interests. You know, how contracts are null and void if signed under duress or coercion? Not really willingly consenting to become subjects.
4. CONTROL. The authorities wanted control. They wanted submission to their authority. They wanted to enforce obedience. (Especially when masks became an "us" vs "them" identifier, they wanted their enemies brought to heel.) And requiring masks was a thoroughly visible sign of obedience and submission.
Masks work like the old Chinese habit to wear a hair queue to show obedience to the Emperor. You could choose between wearing a queue or be decapitated.
It was to show obedience to the foreign Manchu Ching dynasty that had conquered China. When the 1911 revolution ended Ching rule, almost all men got rid of their queues very quickly.
Working on longer piece, a book review, which should be up tomorrow, hence nothing yesterday and shorter post today. Book reviews take a long time.
Every post is a treasure no matter how long :)
He has to make it extra good so Alex Berenson can link to it.
Poor Alex
Yes indeed.
Good one :-)
You do a great job on all your posts and kudos to all your commentors - the most intelligent discussions around.
thanks so much :)
Viral? Shit... I have another chapter and then need 2-3 days compile my thoughts. Did you read all three of Katherine Ebans pieces in Rolling Stone? Great complement to Chan/Ridley’s work.
Senger right now, Viral probably next week.
(Viral is much more complicated, but they are kind of complementary in a strange way.)
What are they about? Rolling Stone has a bad record with accuracy, so I don't read it.
Lab Leak. She’s done a fantastic job reporting on this the last 18 months. Very long pieces but well worth the read. (And I meant Vanity Fair, not Rolling Stone)
This is her latest, previous two are linked within.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
Oh, the Vanity Fair piece! Yes, it's very good. Not much new for people who've been paying attention, but really well researched and being in that publication will probably minds the way no substack and blog posts, no matter how good they are, ever can... the sort of people who only trust one of the "real" magazines.
I tried convincing someone to read Katherine's piece (they refused to read Viral), and she replied, "I don't get my science from Vanity Fair".
Going through her profile I noticed in August 2020 she shared this:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-covid-19-infections-would-plummet-new-study-says
I'm done.
Australia’s Shari Markson also did a wonderful job in her book. This was against the zeitgeist in Australia to some extent - although Prime Minister did call for a serious investigation which raised the ire of China. That was the last sensible move - because Australia then became one of the most rigidly pro vax & restrictive country in the workd. This had staggered many Australians as much as it has shocked the rest of the world who thought they were easy going freedom lovers. That related to previous generations & is no longer true.
turns out they're easy going sheep with an easy indifference to the suffering of others - lindy chamberlain, david irving, boat people, julian assange, people beaten down and made to suffer by mask rubbish, thousands (yes, thousands) of Australians stranded abroad at immense cost to themselves .... and so on.
a simple fact we have to deal with.
Haven't read that one yet, just ordered it! Thanks
here's the TWIV interview with Daszak et al when they came back from their WHO trip to China. Daszak says they were not allowed into the lab but Shi Zhengli said she didn't work on Sars-CoV2 and he "believed her" which is really good scientific evidence if you ask me!
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-760/
i really find this podcast unbearable. they are so smug and superior and really believe that they will save the world by making vaccines for every possible ailment and forcing them on us for our own good, of course
Read it and its depth, precision and balance reminded me of 35 years ago when I'd put my life on hold when the latest issue of Vanity Fair arrived in the mail.
AGREED
Eugyppius - Have you come to the conclusion that all of this, the pandemic response, was not organic, not how things would play out if the governments motives were only about responding and dealing with a true pandemic?
Western nations have for several years been gaming out a pandemic response to a SARS like virus and yet when one hits their initial response is a non-response, down play it only to very quickly do a full 180. That alone is suspicious, once you add how they responded with each less lethal variant, doubling down on efforts to impose restrictions and mandates, just makes it look more dubious. I know many adhere to the philosophy of don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence however those same people also believe that any argument of a slipper slope is a fallacy despite the world bearing witness to slipper slopes playing out.
I believe they've been gaming a pandemic because they were expecting one but it wasn't covid. When covid struck someone realized it was an opportunity to do what they had been gaming for years and so they did a 180. Unfortunately for them coved was less lethal than what was needed but since they had already begun operations they had to market the virus to the public, convince the public it was worse than it really was. Once omicron struck it was no longer possible to keep the lie alive with the majority. When the variant of the virus became more effective than the vaccine but the governments kept acting like nothing had changed is when covid narrative collapse syndrome swept through the nations. True believers are still buying into the governments lies but the rest now see that at best it was greed and incompetence and at worse a nefarious effort to do things like a passport and tracking system that would not be doable expect during an emergency like this.
The mask is an effort to try and keep fear alive so as to justify retention of emergency powers as much as is possible. Not every state or nation will do this but those controlled by Authoritarians will.
Totally agree. We passed incompetence long ago, if it ever was. Going through Fauci's emails, we KNOW FOR SURE that he had all the 'correct' information, he simply ignored what wasn't politically convenient. That's why "The Science" has more closely followed political science this entire time.
Exactly. I believe those in power who are corrupt like for us to think its incompetence as that's less detrimental to them than if we believed it was malice and not incompetence. Most agree our system is full of corruption but many still refuse to believe it's anything more than corruption/greed that could be what is behinds what the elected officials and especially the unelected bureaucrats, that persist across multiple administrations from different parties, do.
I've always found it very strange how we don't see replacements for key/important unelected officials like the head of the various intel agencies and their key people when there is a change of which party has the white house. I can see these not changing when a Democrat president replaces an existing Democrat president but when the party changes why does the new president not replace these critical roles with new people? I'm confident that Trump didn't because of (intentional) bad advice from is dubious son-in-law who I believe is a member of the establishment. Trump isn't, he's a wild gun for the establishment hacks but no doubt that son-in-law of his is a full fledged member of the sell-outs.
Your review of Pamdemia was magisterial.
One reason they promote masks is because if everyone wears them, then surely there must be a virus in the first place.
This assumption is probably false. There may be a virus, but primarily they're just putting Remdesivir in the water supply:
https://rumble.com/v10miez-world-premiere-watch-the-water.html
I'm pulling out what's left of my hair. How can science be this utterly broken?
We had a hypothesis. We tested it. We tested a million billion times, in every country, in every cohort. Our hypothesis failed. It failed when we tried two masks. When we tried n95s. When we tried it at nursing homes. It failed, and failed, and failed.
But we became so in love with our hypothesis, and it became such an easy way to get published if we could data-drudge our way through some retrospective bullshit study, that we kept up this charade, and now have only the weight of a hundred ridiculous studies as "evidence".
Now half the world is convinced this useless intervention has value. Beyond the damage we are doing to toddlers, think of the long term implications? How many PhDs and MPHs are going to conduct research beginning with the premise "That masks work"? How much detriment will that have to future decades of research when we begin with a baked-in assumption that falsely describes viral behavior? How much damage would have been done if we clung to elevation correlating to Cholera for another 50 years after Snow demonstrated otherwise?
Everyone looks to John Snow as the hero of Epidemiology, but what we need is the next William Farr.
Who among the Public Health establishment will concede, just as William Farr had done 160 years ago, that their pet theory turned out to be completely wrong?
This nonsense needs to end. We knew for 100 years that masks didn't stop bacteria much less viruses. We knew through RCT even in the operating room they had no measurable impact on asepsis.
Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.
What do we need to do? Resurrect the James Randi 1 million dollar prize to challenge practitioners of this pseudoscience to prove their claims? Or would people like Gorski just claim they are "above" having to demonstrate their claims [1] and simply point to that time some people in a salon in Georgia who agreed to be tested didn't get Covid while wearing loose fitting cloth masks as his mic drop?
The public health establishment has been thoroughly Gish Galloped. They point to the 100+ "pro" IVM studies as example of how something false can be Gish Galloping, but refuse to realize they too have fallen for the same logical fallacy.
Social Media Archaeologists will someday find the primary source of how something that doesn't work got 70 studies to "show" it does work [2], but we can't wait for them to catch up.
I have taken that original collection of Gishes and added to it over the last 18 months, including every study, notable article, or Bill Nye TikTok into this spreadsheet. Now I need the next William Farr to take over and shut down this nonsense once and for all.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahaJui6Af0kGYMwHgAtnKCE6-bHbCLxnrQxuMC0kygA/edit?usp=sharing
Who's it going to be?
[1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/debate-me-bro-debate-challenges-by-science-deniers-in-the-age-of-covid-19/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
really great comment. every time some scientist or lauterbach-type figure starts talking about the ScIEnCE oF MaSKinG I feel much the same urge to tear out my beard. what science, what are they talking about? it feels like, whenever anybody invokes "science" these days, there is nothing so certain, as that whatever they're about to utter has nothing to do with "science" at all
It means 'the political science', same as it always did.
They refer to all these new studies showing how masks stop droplets on a mannequin. High school science experiments which have no relationship to clinical Covid outcome. Here in US they simply disallow mention of the actual experiments run to try to prove mask validity. CDC puts up the weak, underpowered studies; excludes the better data. Simple, right!? And absolutely maddening as you say.
And they never seem to answer the next question: If the mask stops the infected droplet, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Because I'm pretty sure the answer to that is: the droplet evaporates and now the virus is airborne on your next exhale.
Edit: Remember the CDC pointing to the Kansas study? What a joke that was.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/et-tu-snohomish?s=w
"WHAT HAPPENS NEXT"!?!
Exactly. Sagan First Principles:
1) the virus is .08-.14 nanometers.
2) Micropore on N95 is 8 microns. That means roughly 5,000 virions side by side can pass through n95 micropore at once. Running that math for surgical (80 microns) or cloth (100-500 microns) we are now at 500K - 30 million virions side-by-side through hole.
3) I still haven't seen the evidence they are only attached to water vapor and not freely floating (I might be completely wrong). How big then are the water droplets? For decades we said >5 microns, but science agreed that was wrong (yet still clung even harder to Maskology for some reason - honestly I thought this was the end of the religion) [1]
4) How many virions emitted per breath for "x" activity. Does anyone know? I have studies suggesting as little as 1,000 per breath and as many as 1 million.
5) How many virions does it take to cause infection? Does anyone know? I have studies suggesting as few as 10 and as many as 100.
6) Run #4 and #5 through a 95% filter. Does it even matter anymore? would a 99% filter matter? Would you trust a cloth, surgical, or n95 around anthrax? Pepper spray even?
7) Air flows through path of least resistance. I absolutely agree with Denise Dewald that you need to be using surgical tape to seal your N95 to a clean shaven face (you have to look her up on Twitter if you aren't familiar, most consider her the final boss of Mask Cult, but I have a suspicion she is a deep-fake-Andy Kaufman-esque parody account who is even more committed to her illusion than Alfred Borden)
8) What happens to the fraction of viruses that don't get sucked through the micropores or sides/top/bottom of the masks? Is the mask some sort of bug zapper? No. Every breath would logically break them free and nebulize them. It's ridiculous to even have to explain this. Where did they think they went? The Mask Elf collects them?
How can these people be so stupid? For fucks-sake we only discovered viruses because something kept passing through our CERAMIC filters when Pasteur and company were trying to isolate bacteria. Try breathing through a ceramic sealed mask and know that viruses would STILL get through.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
aha.. that's a good one. powerful one. virus passes through ceramic filters. there's a meme. thank you for that. I can use it.
there's another point I always try to make, too: masking isn't a thing it's a process and must be performed correctly at the right time in the right context.
The effectiveness of the whole process can be destroyed by one false move. It's always been thus with filtering.
If they tried masking against mustard gas they'd soon find out. A couple of marines voluntary subjected themselves to such a test. On youtube somewhere.
p.s.
anyone got a link to anything about that process it would be good....
p.p.s. I googled and found a good hit straight away. Household ceramic pot filters are very effective against microbes but very poorly effective against virus. Whole swag of papers can be downloaded there in on hit;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1438463919307151
I saw that!
Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17FaG7mLEvo
Adding to my list
Another way to have the same effect as the mannequin study is to refrain from coughing or spitting in someone's face. Good 'ol common sense and manners will stop droplets, too.
But neither masks nor etiquette will stop aerosol transmission.
Yes!! Mind our manners - like grandma taught or Dr. Roger Hodkinson railed about. If you are unwell, stay home and get back to life once you are better!
Do mannequins breath?
Wait until "they" realize what an environmental disaster this is causing. 30 billion used masks in land fills and the ocean.
It's one of the great mysteries that the biggest paddlers of Corona mandates are also pimps for climate change yet not a single word about how masks have ruined the environment. On my lawn alone I've picked up at least a dozen masks in the past few months. Now extrapolate this anecdote across the West and it's easy to see the colossal problem this has caused. And yes, ingesting all these microfibres will also come with its own set of consequences. But hey, will the astrologer-scienticians connect it? Probably not. All we'll get is 'we needed to to do it' or some invocation of plausible deniability.
I should add about the apparent shift towards masks. It was all more or less in unison. Once one started, everyone jumped on it. It's almost as if - it feels like anyway - someone made a call to health officials and said, 'No, masks 'work'. /wink. We're gonna need you to go ahead and push masks and fill out those TPS reports'. Not to sound too conspiratorial but there had to be some behind the scenes decision.
And now all have been brainwashed and we end up with a third of the people afraid to move on without masks.
Nearly every physician in the West is a member of a professional society that issues periodical updates instructing them what to think and do. Mine come from the College of American Pathologists, and my wife gets them from the American Academy of Family Physicians. Brought to you by Pfizer, or Merck, or A-Z.... You get the picture. I am confident in my wild guess that public health officials, hospital administrators and healthcare institution IT directors get similar updates.
Don't worry Pfizer will make a ''vaccine '' for every thing .Sick from the snout pouches?? Take a vaucci venom .
Will they come up with a vaccine against stupidity?
and every one of them represents a sum of money out of the pockets of the people and into the pockets of the profiteers.
Absolutely! Some time ago, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation: https://cm27874.substack.com/p/how-many-masks-does-it-take-to-screw
And shortly after that, they introduced N95 requirements in Germany, which makes things even worse.
These are truly horrendous numbers! Thanks for running through the math.
Someone's getting rich though so it's OK.
Yes. Luckily there is a plus side too: a lot less petrol was burned, a lot less takeaway coffee cups were consumed, and so on as people worked from home.
Yes, I broke my Starbucks habit 2 years ago! Free at last!
yep.
I think there's a basic error, a presumption that others cogitate on the same level, in the same way you do yourself.
My suspicion is that the masses simply think like this:
. they must do SOME good. (irrefutable. something must be stopped)
. everyone else is doing it - the mass knows better than I.
. the govt demands it and I lose hundreds of dollars or more if I'm caught without.
. rather be safe than sorry
. it's not such a hassle anyway while we wait for it all to go away
. all the govts in the world are doing it
. even the Presidents do it even out in the open on airfields
. those rich powerful people wouldn't do it for nothing.
Get it? That comfortably covers the whole experience for them.
I don't know what you call that kind of reasoning and I'm no social scientist or whatever you'd 'need' to be to analyse and categorise it.
But I'm enough of an experienced human being to know that it is a pretty fair representation of the thought processes of the individuals of the mob.
And if you look at that list of 'reasonings' you see that nothing we say properly addresses any of it.
And add to that the fact that 'we' don't figure in their world. They don't see us. They don't hear from us. They never see our charts or our data, never read threads or articles like this.
They swim in a sea of govt propaganda 100%.
Where I live the only counter propaganda I have ever seen was pasted up on walls by myself. Pictures of charts and later QI codes linking to powerful evidence.
In two years. And they were always gone the following day.
Doctors consult with patients and wear masks as they do it.
Doctors are forbidden to even express an opinion whilst wearing that mask that it might be contrary to logic and/or science or that they personally might disagree.
That's how totalitarian our society IS. Not dreaming. Not exaggerating. Not alarmist. Fact: IS.
So don't tear you hair out wondering how they can be like this. Not if I'm correct in my observations at all. It is perfectly natural for them to be like this.
You know what? The hair tearing unnatural is the total lack of any counter propaganda from us. Like me. I gave up. I put up no more posters, manufacture no more QI codes, never try to explain anything to anyone.
The doctors, the medical profession generally has initiated no anonymous, pervasive very clever and powerful counter narrative.... their silence is the silence not even of those thoroughly cowed emitting the occasional scream of pain.. no, it is the silence of those totally, calmly, in accord.
Our legal profession says nothing of the misuse of emergency powers.
Our human rights big mouths usually so strident and demanding this and that (including public funds for themselves) are silent, totally silent.
Our 'opposition party' politicians say nothing at all - they do not object to repeated regular impositions of nonsensical 'States of Emergency'.
The Main Stream Media.... well, we all know...
Now all of they - and more, I don't think I covered all - by rights belong to 'us'. The knowledgeable, the enlightened, the knowing, the deliberately 'knowing', the people who take an interest in the wider world, the state of the nation, the philosophy of society and health and science itself.
It is 'us' who are at fault. Yes. If you mean tear you hair out because of 'us' then yes. For sure.
But everything I ever see and read is metaphorically tearing its hair out because of the mass, the mob, the 'sheeple' etc.
But they're not the problem. Physician heal thyself. It's us is the problem. 'Us'.
Isn't it?
I agree. Where I live until recently, the only sign of resistance were little stickers that a group called the white rose put up on lamp posts with messages like "you are being lied to", You comply because you want it to end. Because you comply it will never end" etc. They all got ripped down very quickly. Most people get all their news and information from msm which were all on message. I think they started with the mask thing pre vax just so they could say they were doing something to be honest. When the protest happened at parliament the negative press was awful. Not one member of parliament would talk to us. We were described as the 'river of filth'. But it did make a difference. I'm back at work now and everyone is being as obedient to the new rules as to the old. A few mutterings about me being there (not yet in the office) but I've made it clear that I am not wearing a mask.
Yes I saw maybe three white rose stickers, is all. I tried to trace the group and all I could find related to some English group.
It is pretty hopeless. I have a site: covidhonesty.com and I plan to continue it and work on it and categorise, sort out the links, gradually build it up to something that is a rock solid repository of rock solid truth regarding all this.
If I can.
slowly, slowly. I'm very slow. :)
I think its not a group as such but people all over just buying a printer that can produce the stickers and away they go. I'd a quick look at your site, well done. It is NOT hopeless.
There's apparently a couple of groups by that name that don't appear to be too good - not really into covid truth.
I had been thinking to join their effort - do as you say, copy the template, print and post. But after finding that out I think I'll continue with my own home grown QR posts and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose_(disinformation_group)
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/exposing-the-far-right-in-australia-an-interview-with-the-white-rose-society/
God bless you for have courage. So little these days. I love to hear stories of others who first THINK and then put their defiance in action
I agree… I think governments had to feel and be seen to do something rather than nothing as well….I know an OIA was done on mask use when it was first mandated in NZ for public transport. We had no cases at the time due to shutting off from the world….the official response was to ‘remind people of the risk’. I see Philadelphia is reintroducing them today! I get so depressed over this some days and the lack of logic!
this was a good one i just got reminded of... still useful to show around..
the marines and their mask test
Snoqualmie Valley Marines Testing Masks with Bear Spray 40,130 views Feb 8, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17FaG7mLEvo
I've just lived through the hardest winter of my life, thanks to the German Angst and the population-wide vaccine mandate that they almost imposed on us.
I'm currently avoid all still conforming colleagues, friends and family members. I make it a requirement not to speak about corona or vaccines when going out to dinner, or say "we need to change the topic" if it crops up at other occasions. I brightly smile at my still mask-wearing, though not required, highly educated colleagues and mentally add them to my definitely boosted list. Maybe one day they will figure it out for themselves. Maybe not. I don't try to convince anyone anymore, I wasted a lot of energy on this previously.
Exactly. I think we all understand how you feel and feel the same way. It's very easy to feel it is all hopeless. But I guess it is not. Things change, turn around, eventually, always I think.
I was thinking of cards today. You know how you carry a card with your name, business, number on it? Or tradesmen and such do anyway.
Well I was thinking of having some of them made up. But no name, address, number, business. Just a QI code. Or QR - I find now they are called QR codes and only a few refer to them as QI. Well QR codes.
Carry some of those little 'calling cards' or whatever they're called and have printed on them a couple or more QR codes that link direct to some really telling, dramatic facts.
Like a prominent simple chart maybe of deathrates in adjoining states of the USA both following exactly the same curve but one State with draconian lockdowns and masks and the other without.
Or maybe to a telling video by some 'to the point' and easy to take speaker like Ivor Cumming's presentations he used to put out, or maybe Chris Martensen.
Or perhaps just to a page promoting the book: 'Unmasked'
Or whatever.
Whatever I can find that I reckon would have the greatest impact in the shortest time, to get into them, plant something in their brains, catch their attention for a minute.
Perhaps we should assemble a list of what links people think would fit that bill best.
And then we could all do that same thing.
No arguing necessary. Not pasting on posts or walls. Nothing dramatic. No drama. We could even just leave them on shop counters, in libraries, anywhere and everywhere.
People will point their phones at them out of curiosity...
I think I could get into the habit of that and get to enjoy finding better and better links to QR. :)
Think that's a good idea and want to suggest something you can write to 'truth' at that address - covidhonesty.com
Nailed it
I think taking responsibility is smart. I let myself be goaded into quiet at first about the masks; my wife didn’t want me to make waves. Eventually I became very vocal and spoke out against the masks in schools or public places and helped our local county to rescind mask mandate at her county level. But the people we are up against don’t care what we say. They rely on the shoddy “science” and ad hominem attacks agains us, or anyone who thinks to show them otherwise. The only way is to change the education methods in the developed world. There is a reason it is compulsory and controlled by the State in so many places...
I can't stress enough that I suspect our largest problem is the "A-B-P" problem of academia. Always. Be. Publishing.
Suddenly we gave all these PhDs the EASIEST way to get published - write about masks. It has to be pro mask of course, else you have to beg for publication like Danmask study... but if you can p-hack, data drudge, or provide some statistically insignificant signal that Masks made some marginal benefit, BOOM! You are published! I am deeply familiar with the 280 entries on my list and so many are just hilariously bad I sometimes wonder if this is just some huge experiment on gullibility (*Chef's kiss* to Kristin Andrejko's study #264).
In the US, suddenly in June of 2020, the 4th study in that list "Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19" (Zhang et al), became the most cited article in history of PNAS, and was used as the hyperlink to the liturgical responsorial hymn "Which we know work" whenever the holy word of "Masks" was invoked by the press. The retraction request was of course ignored by that same set of journalists [1], as was the obviousness of how easily the results could be manipulated if you were remotely familiar with regression [2]
But this marked an important milestone in The Science - nonsense was now valued and could be the fastest way to getting published. I have no idea how many thousands of attempts to demonstrate efficacy had to be "file drawered" before they could come up with hard hitters like "Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in Kansas". The Gold Rush began.
By November 2020 Social Media Personality Katelyn Jetelina aka "Your Local Epidemiologist" created the Facebook post [3] which I used as template for my expanded collection. In the US, that post became the universal "mic drop" anytime someone would question the efficacy. All you had to do was share that post, and suddenly The Science was settled. It's hilarious by hindsight reading her summary of the studies.
I would love to re-write a few of these and replace "mask" with "Ivermectin", and watch academics suddenly become interested in high quality data, RCT, and the dangers of promoting relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.
Imagine if we took the results of the Bangladesh mask study as template - suppose I said "I went to a village (n=16,032), told them how dangerous covid was, told them to be careful, then gave them some IVM tabs, then compared to a 'do nothing' village (n=14,678). After intervention we had only 111 villagers get Covid in the IVM village compared to a whopping 1,12 out the control group! Amazing, right...??"
I would get laughed out of The Science.
[1] https://metrics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj13936/f/files/pnas_loe_061820_v3.pdf
[1] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-study-looking-at-mandatory-face-masks-and-number-of-covid-19-infections-in-new-york-wuhan-and-italy/
[2] https://roadtolarissa.com/regression-discontinuity/
[3] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
"Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans." I find this sentence infuriating. As an independent (a Democrat long ago), I find the Democrats practically delusional and incredibly destructive, so I would never vote for one. But I also find the bizarre hatred of the "other side" even worse. I don't care who says something -- Republican, Democrat, Whig, whatever. If COMMUNIST proved that masks didn't work, I'd believe him. If someone who wanted to restore the monarchy of France proved it, I'd believe it. It's either right or it's wrong. The same people (I'm talking to YOU, Kamala Harris) who said they wouldn't trust a vaccine if Trump came up with it are afraid not to wear masks because they might look like Republicans to their fellows. Everyone has gone stark, raving mad. There are FACTS.
Yes. As a result of all this, I'm striving to operate under the rubric of paying attention to the message, not the messenger.
Been telling people since 2016, STOP shooting the messenger.
I’ve basically been begging people to read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt to help them escape this delusion.
Yes, the truth is the truth. Just because someone doesn't like the person telling the truth doesn't make it not the truth. But humans believe otherwise because of "feelings."
We now have 'my truth' and 'your truth' to contend with though which I guess really is feelings not facts.
Judgements. Judgements come before feelings. Our judgement create our feelings. Yes, truth is truth.
'Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.'
Yes.
It certainly means some of us are now.
I'm not a single issue voter. As a longtime liberal, I have nevertheless come around to appreciating the stand of many Republicans on Covid measures. But I still really dislike other things they support. Please note, I've also come to dislike a lot of Democratic positions. Right now I'm at the point of saying 'a pox on both your houses'.
It was Democrats who excoriated the unvaccinated and denied them basic human freedoms. They are the party of Davos, domestically concerned only with advancing the causes of various sexual curiosities. As a former loyal Democrat, I will never, ever, under any circumstances vote for a Democrat again.
Wish I could get a refund for my campaign contributions made over the years.
>I will never, ever, under any circumstances vote for a Democrat again.
You are half-way there ;)
There is a Nazi Germany/USSR vibe to the Rs and Ds. Both are contemptible, but let's get rid of the immediate threat first.
Please distinguish between the Republican establishment and the Republican base. The GOPe hates it's base as much as the Democrats do.
But you you what,T, we hate them back.
They do not represent us and we know it.
I was for 46 years a straight ticket Democrat: never again.
I proudly call myself a member of the Republican base: The Great Unwashed; The Deplorables; The Threat to Democracy; whatever.
It would be so great if the Republicans were actually the solution to the problem. Of course, they're not, and you're right. DeSantis has done mostly the right things because Floridians wouldn't have stood for any more crap. Ron Johnson has done some important work exposing Pfizer's treachery. No other Republican has done anything other than empty grandstanding and fundraising.
Don't blame me. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Imagining the universe in which he won is almost enough to make me cry.
A fellow Ohioan! Amy Acton shares blame with DeWine. Unbelievable
I believe it's false in any case to have a two party system.
It is a terrible system, but it's so entrenched that it is nearly impossible to start a third party (and have it amount to anything) or to go without one as a true independent. Both parties are compromised by the globalists, but their hold on one of the two is more shaky than on the other.
Yes I know. I sympathise. It is the same in Australia. They're always trying to start new parties and they never do any good. OR - you could say they do much good, if you want to think along certain lines, for oft times they have held 'the balance of power' and govts find themselves having to do deals with these minority parties to get the programmes through.
There's one now that I've joined: Clive Palmer's 'United Australia Party' I think it's called.
I joined it in order to add my tiny bit of weight to the notion that we should NOT return any of the existing politicians. None of them. In govt. or in opposition. For they have all been extraordinarily and inexcusably malfeasant, to this very day. With one or two individual exceptions, I should admit.
But I haven't joined it because I think it will ever form a government. It may get to that holding the balance of power position I suppose but even that's doubtful for I think the future is perhaps something more like is the Indian model? - where there's so many parties that all governments are coalitions and deals are the order of the day?
My thought is that it is all anachronistic today. With the internet and smartphones we're all part of the one incredibly swift and knowledgeable machine which could be polling all of us on a continuing basis more or less and discovering our wishes on every little thing that comes up.
Like if I had my own account the same as I have my own bank account I could have my position on certain things tabulated on it, like in a spreadsheet.
No need for me to vote every four years. My voting desire is there always available for anyone ( or for privacy just the govt. or the govt machine) to view and take note of, add to the numbers.
Given that I can change it at any time at all.
Or if I'm not interested in taking any notice of what government does - as this covid thing indicates something like 80% of the population are not - then my choice can just sit there unchanged through the years.
And other columns of this 'spreadsheet' could flag my wishes of various issues of the day.
Instant referendum. Instant polling. Instant feedback from the population.
This would be a thousand fold closer approach to the idea of democracy than anything we have right now.
Govts are frightened of it for whatever reason - loss of autonomous ability to declare states of emergency, adopt emergency powers, rape the country and imprison the inhabitants would seem a good possibility after what we've seen, learned. And they put up objections like - the last reply I got - 'security considerations'. Suggesting what? That my bank account security is no good? Or they couldn't implement that level of security?
Suggesting to me they're liars as usual, hiding something.
So they won't implement it.
And some don't like the idea for they fear it'd be too easy for the meatheads or whatever to speak up and influence everything. But that's democracy, dude, that's what we've opted for.
And I frankly don't think it's any danger at all.
So that's where I think we should go.
And failing the ability to go there I think we should do the next best thing:
Pretend your local and federal elected reps ARE your own 'account' in this system I've described and treat them that way. Keep signalling your likes and dislikes, decisions and indecisions to them.
That's what I think we should do.
We simply install a new system.
We use them. Instead of them using us.
🤣🤣🤣
No. The "bad team" DID have evidence to back it up - the same evidence Eugyppius wrote about at the beginning of this post. It was well known -- not with Covid, specifically, but with airborne respiratory viruses.
The "bad team" didn't approach this from an evidence-based approach. Rather, they tried treating masks as a personal choice, confronting it from a libertarian argument rather than a scientific one. This allowed the Public Health Idiots to conflate it with Seat Belts (one of the dumbest analogies out there), indicating that both sides agree they work, they only disagreed if the choice to wear them should reside with the State or the Individual.
Politicians across the board on the Bad Team didn't have the intelligence, balls, or whatever to draw a line in the sand that they simply don't work. At all. DeSantis got closer recently with his evisceration of the high schools kids participating the in the theater, so that was nice.
The irony of the YLE Viral Post [1] is that 50 of her 85 Gish Gallopped studies she flaunts were published between 2003-2019.
Think about that.
The Maskologists have proof masks work, going back to 2003. So I wonder, are the 20,000,000 flu deaths in those 18 years on their hands? What about the 30,000,000 Tuberculosis deaths in that time frame. Are they accountable for those too?
I mean, they apparently had all this fantastic knowledge and they chose to sit on it? They could have saved close to 50,000,000 people!
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
The libertarian approach 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 have been the slam-dunk rebuttal to Covidism in any country that values liberty, as one would expect to be the case in the so-called "land of the free." Whether draconian violations of civil rights had the desired effect upon the problem or not is, in many ways, beside the point... these measures would never be seriously considered in a free society, and the sole purpose of the American government is to ensure that we do, in fact, live in a free society. It's not to ensure our safety or keep us healthy. It's to keep us free. And it has failed miserably.
When we didn't know how deadly Covid was or wasn't, it made sense to keep people from spreading it by being stupid and selfish--I don't care whether you're a libertarian, Typhoid Mary had no right to deliver milk and infect people just because SHE didn't get typhoid and didn't believe it could be spread by someone with no symptoms. But once it became clear that it was deadly, but mostly to certain groups, these emergency, just-in-case measures for everyone should have been dropped at once. They weren't because politicians are not particularly bright, and it's hard to tell terrified people that there's nothing to be afraid of. In general, they won't believe you -- especially when they are being told by others that they are all in danger of dying and/or that their being careless could kill someone else.
The absolute nonsense of restaurants full of people sitting at tables unmasked but putting on masks to walk to the bathroom, or people on planes wearing masks when it became clear that they were NOT spreading Covid by flying, or CHILDREN wearing masks in American schools... none of that had anything to do with reason or health. But I argued with a school board member about it -- he told me in no uncertain terms that children were at GREAT risk, and didn't care what evidence I had. He actually told me "you and I live in different worlds." I told him I lived in the one with facts and evidence. But did that matter? NO. Once fear takes hold, fear wins.
I agree that the politicians and activists did this. But activists always boil things down to slogans, and the politicians on both sides said nonsense. The evidence was always ALL on the side of masks not working. It was not secret or weird, obscure information -- it was what anyone would find in all the public health and medical literature. That's what I meant. Whatever nonsense an activist or politician spewed, there was evidence to back up the claim that masks would not help, and none to back up the claim that masks prevent Covid. Remember the idiotic chart that showed people PEEING in each other? That was the "masks work" science.
It is a common (false) narrative that early and persistent skeptics "got lucky" or that their criticism was rooted entirely in their selfish or antisocial goals rather than in response to the facts.
What's interesting about these objections, when they arise, is that they are tacitly admitting fault but defending their positions on the grounds that their opponents (us) arrived at our conclusions "the wrong way."
Indeed, much like getting the correct answer on a math test but being marked wrong because it was arrived at by means other than what had been taught.
I used to get that shit a lot in school. This was years before common core, where you basically have to be a robot who can spout progressive propaganda at grade level.
I’m sorry for your hair loss. Alopecia is an jab adverse event listed..... well I may have to add it.... 😂
I'm still a pure blood...
Hair loss I blame on having a redhead teenage daughter
lol
I’m sure it was from spike shedding from the vaccinated. I’m determined to blame it on the vaccines. 😂 but you just want to blame the teenager, always blaming the teenager.
(Sorry, this whole business has me and us too serious sometimes, we occasionally need a good laugh).
I should have taken this photo from the top too... correlation = causation 🤣
https://www.facebook.com/1420096175/posts/10220394943649907/?d=n
Too sweet. Thanks. Those pics are precious, along with our laughter.
Take courage! Apparently Pfizer has a new drug for it now...
Every-time I hear of a new drug I do a latest image search on Jeff Bezos to see if it works or not yet.
I still have all my hair in the face ,since it is very hard to shave behind my 3 masks. Oh and its not J.S.85 anymore ,it's Joe 86 now
Hair loss remediation billboards have started to appear along highways in the South. Pretty sure this was never a billboard-worthy thing before.
Consider how Ancel Keys' fraudulent behavior distorted dietary science for the better part of 60 years. That was just one bogus study (his cherry picking did uncover high cardiac rates for countries with heavy margarine consumption) and we are still trying to unwind the myths surrounding dietary fat/cholesterol.
With lots of help from pharma. What would we do without statins? The "OG" of efficacy trials. Lower frequency of non-fatal heart attacks in the treatment group but higher all cause mortality than in the control group. Sound familiar?
Wow! So I made the right choice to stop taking them then?
Yes. Look up the work of cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in the UK. He's got lots to say on this, in a pretty accessible way. (And he's also been ringing the alarm about vaccine-induced myocarditis).
Wow! Guess what? I suffered from nearly all the side effects mentioned! Even with other factors at play, this couldn't be all a coincidence! I started taking them to keep healthy with a history of stroke in my family about 18 years ago. Feeling much better now. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.
Yeah I think this hypothesis is going to last a generation at least. There’s just too many people on record now, they can’t accept the embarrassment.
EXACTLY.
Well said my friend.
Public health left North Americans obese and diabetic decades before the Magic Bug and you're just pulling your hair out now?
"How can science be this utterly broken?"
Well it's been broken for a long time. Those of us who participated in the debunking of the "hole in the ozone layer" fraud of the 90s, or the vastly larger ongoing fraud of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, have been all too aware of the failure of science to avoid the fate of the humanities as they fell to the forces of leftism.
It's never too late. There's always hope. Reject leftist ideology.
Hi Michael - this is a fantastic list. A quick question: in these types of lists I rarely see Neil Orr's 1981 study included. I realize it is in a surgical environment, but it's 40 years old, short (~2 pgs), conclusive, and written simply enough to be well-understood by laymen. Is there a reason it's not included? This was the first mask study that came to my attention in Feb 2020 and had profound effect on my personal behavior and attitudes over the last 2 years.
To be clear, I'm not criticizing that you haven't listed one small study from 40 years ago; I'm wondering if you're aware of it and if there's a reason why I can't recall it ever having been mentioned in these type communities. Perhaps there's something methodologically wrong with it? Best I can tell, it might be dismissed for small sample size, but I'm not sophisticated enough to conclude that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/
Thanks, it is an ever growing list, so will add this to my collection. I intend to include everything I can find, no matter how old, how high or low of quality. I have roughly 50 in queue (separate private tab) I haven't read through yet which will eventually be added. Not included in this shared version are my notes for each entry. I just wanted a reference point so anytime some smug idiot tried to discuss the latest results from "Maricopa and Pima counties" or some other CDC nonsense I'd be able to Matt Damon his ass.
It's tough trying to outrun Brandolini's law...
In a couple weeks we'll find you in here regurgitating Gordon Wood..
Just checked, I did have it in my unread queue, as it was sourced in "Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: A controlled study" from 1991 (#125), I just hadn't gone through all the references in detail yet, but Orr was in there. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply. Again, this one might be low-quality as it specifically deals with wound infection in surgical setting, and bacterial infection at that. I found it compelling, but perhaps that's my ignorance. Cheers!
Paraphrasing someone I read a few years back: Science is fragile. In a fight between science and Power science will always lose. Therefore to survive it must be separated from the State.
I hadn't revisited Your Local Epidemiologist's Mask Thread in quite some time until today. Man those comments are gold. This was most recent one. Imagine still believing in this nonsense by August 2021:
"Why is this STILL a debated topic by people OTHER than public health experts and epidemiologists???" > https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321&comment_id=383115446669704
I spent my working career at a large semiconductor manufacturer in the US,
working in the “yield” team. Our everyday mission was to get more and more of the chips we made to work ( those that are faulty get tossed AFTER money and time is spent making them). It was routine for me to have to remind other engineers that “the data needed to influence opinion” and not the other way around. Engineers, mind you.
Hey, hey... easy on the engineers ;)
I know, we’re strange. But ok in our own way. :-)
Science doesn't break, people break. Science isn't a thing, it's a process. The problem is people who claim to use scientific methods were corrupted by their politics, and people who should have recognized their corruption did not, some because they are also corrupt, most because they just don't know any better. The failed education system has undermined scientific knowledge and critical thinking for several generations. Many people recognized the corruption and the deception early in this disaster, but still suffered the companion failure of education -- the unwillingness to stand for their convictions, or even to have any. Tolerance trumps principles every time.
We have met the enemy and he is us. Blaming "science" for our own failures is just another copout. The question now is what will we do about it. More of the same, apparently.
surely 'science' is simply 'truth'? as best we know it at that time.
Science is just a process for finding the truth. It's a slow process. As Al Bell showed us, science finds a lot of untruths before it finds the truth.
Yes and it never finds 'the truth'. It finds little 'apparent truths' along the way. Even those colossi: relativity and quantum mechanics are known to be 'apparent truths'.
Science often finds the truth. It's how we've made as much progress as we have. It sometimes confirms what is not true, as Alexander G Bell and many others have done, repeatedly. Learning what doesn't work is sometimes as important as finding what does work. The problem we have seen lately is people who haven't proven anything claiming we should accept what they say because ... science. Sure sign of fraud.
Great list - we will cross-reference this to what we have listed on our comprehensive mask report - currently at over 100 studies/articles. https://c19science.info/COVID-19_Masks.pdf
Because it is not about science or medicine or even Government, it is about the power-brokers who run science, medicine and Government.
Cholera and the discoveries by John Snow & Henry Whitehead (?) 'The Ghost Map' - a wonderful book by Steven Johnson
Masks reinforced the subconscious awareness of a threat. It was the only visible evidence a pandemic was actually happening.
Exactly. It was a reminder to BE SCARED BECAUSE SOMETHING IS WRONG -- AND IT'S TRUMP'S FAULT.
In the multiverse, somewhere there is a world where Trump, being a noted germaphobe, immediately started wearing a mask February of 2020 and the media reminded everyone that masks don’t work and how stupid Trump is for believing such silly nonsense.
Well, it was his fault, since he bought into many of the premises of the C19 threat. This is where a lifetime of intellectual laziness gets you..
Trump didn't impose mask mandates on me or make it illegal for me to go to work. That was 100% Jay Inslee.
But he caved to the narrative and hid behind states rights. He should have led from the beginning, stated the science against masks and lockdowns, and punished states that violated our rights. And fired Fauci and Birx.
I agree he should have stated the science against masks and lockdowns, but states' rights are the Constitutionally correct position for the president. Imagine if everybody in the country had been forced to use the NY protocol of infecting all the at-risk at once by throwing covid patients into nursing homes and then killing them on vents they don't need.
christ almighty. i'm an outside observer of your scene. in Aus. from what I saw Trump had almost no chance of stating anything at any time. as I remember it even the republicans were not on Trump's side. In my life (well over half a century) I've never seen such a concerted and ubiquitous and vicious attack on a public figure never mind a president.
He should have fired that demon Fauci instead of grandstanding with him on TV.
4. Doing something. Anything. "Out of an abundance of caution." It seems for many the mask is a reflexive response to a vague sense of "Covid is out there." To not demand or wear it is to stop worrying about Covid. This is related to making Corona visible, but for the mask-lovers, it is also about holding on to a particular experience of being the smart and cautious ones who are "doing everything right."
But even if "covid is out there," so are colds, flu, bronchitis, etc., and yet we never felt such a need to "do something" so drastic and at the same time so useless. The goal was to CAUSE fear, not assuage it.
Yes... I think "out of an abundance of caution" could have been the drinking game of 2021!
And people still cling to their masks. I was just told by someone if I want to attend their religious service I should wear a mask. I politely said no thank you. Guess I’ll just keep praying and talking to God from home. I asked. Why doesn’t your congregation follow the science? No reply.
Our church for at least the last year has said masks are optional. And I would probably stop attending there if the leadership went in the opposite direction and made it mandatory.
That is so sad. I hope she can find one that doesn’t require them.
Same for me. Found another Mass to go to.
Alex Berenson’s book has a section on it. Masks were totally a psyops. Imposed. BY SAGE. An organization in London that advised such things. Intended to get us all to comply and to empower peers to yell at us all. And to encourage fear.
I know that SAGE is an acronym but it seems to have made such stupid decisions, it's hard not to think it was a cruel joke of some sort.
As I think I recall, the original stated purpose of masks was as the first rung on a compliance ladder, to make it more likely that people followed other restrictions too.
Of course, as with all things, it took on a life of its own and became something to be done just for its own sake.
I always thought it was because they realized they needed to give people some sense of control, something they could DO in the face of so much Terror and Uncertainty. It would deflect the crazy energy from themselves and what was going on. I still think this was true in the beginning, and they can't admit it. Think basic Psy-ops.
Yep. They already admitted they lied about masks to nudge behavior once. They would think nothing of doing it again in order to get people back into the economy.
Once? Many top covidians have said so several times if one pays attention at all. How many times did we hear “a sign of respect”? Signs of respect have nothing to do with medical science, but with behavioral manipulation.
If it is a sign of respect, that means that being forced to wear one is a violation of my first amendment right to free expression. I can't be forced to make a statement of respect any more than I can be forced not to.
At this point, I believe our public health authorities have bad intentions / don’t have our best interest at heart.
I am more curious why the people are still following along.
Some of my potential reasons include:
Fear (thanks to the media and NO thanks to the vaccine): 41% of Democrats thought more than half of people with COVID-19 must be hospitalized. In reality, only 1-5% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 will be hospitalized… if the virus really was that deadly I MAY understand the masks
“For others” / Social Responsibility / Feel Morally-Superior: Public health officials discovered a really good marketing strategy. Their ads are designed to make you feel like a horrible person for NOT wearing a mask, while making the people wearing a mask feel like they are better than / care more about / are saving others when they wear a mask
Don’t want to be labeled conservative: After my college friends got vaccinated, and the CDC granted them permission to be maskless, they had a dilemma: they wanted to be maskless because they wanted people to know they were vaccinated, but they also did not want to be maskless because they didn’t want to be mistaken for an anti-masker, a.k.a. Trump Supporter. Ultimately, they chose (and still choose) to wear a mask. It’s so unfortunate that a piece of cloth became political.
I'm sure a T-shirt exists that says ‘Just because I’m not wearing a mask doesn’t mean I love Trump’. I'd buy one.
I saw a mask which said: I'm only wearing this so I don't get fired.
Your #2 & #3 clearly were major reasons, I but I believe the forced wearing of masks was mostly to make people more susceptible to illness due to hypoxia and the suppression of immune system health, with the goal of boosting the infection numbers to maintain the fear and mass psychosis. Furthermore, masks are akin to a muzzle on a dog, to keep it controlled. Ergo, anyone not wearing one, is a defacto homicidal maniac, and must be exorcised from the "in" group, if not jailed. This was also to maintain the fear-based mass psychosis, and keep people suspicious of eachother, which is deleterious to community harmony. It all worked quite well for a while and still is to some extent. Now, its really all just about placating a few brainwashed covidiot holdouts, and the authorities sick enjoyment they get from exercising idiotic and arbitrary rules over their inferiors, primarily for their amusement. Keep your slaves scared, sick, and poor, and they will never revolt or leave the plantation, comrade...
To follow onto my comment, I also believe the maintenance of fear through masking was extended to enhance acceptance of vaccination. Note that the promise was that if you get vaccinated, they would not continue to force masking. So that was used as the carrot. Then it was "get the jab or lose your job" (i.e. the stick). Then when it was clear that vaccines and masks didn't work, it has been all about reminding us plebs that we are subject to their authority and amusement.
This time it will definitely work...LOLz
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/philadelphia-reinstates-indoor-mask-mandate/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=27332162
It is quite like a muzzle in many ways. And impacts health!! Indeed maddening.
I have read reports that normally lively high school halls, full of students talking and goofing around, are sullen, depressing, dull places when the students are forced into their muzzles. They don't have the spark... it's just a bunch of automatons shuffling from one class to the next like broken-spirit lovestock.
This is part of why I've wondered about places like Disneyland requiring masks. Who would go to an amusement park muzzled? It seems self-evident that it's impossible to have fun that way. I don't see how it's possible to do anything but obsess on the misfortune and injustice of being muzzled. I would not be able to enjoy anything, let alone concentrate on anything and perform useful work of any kind.
Then I read about young people who have not just adapted to their fetters, but who have come to prefer them, and that makes no sense at all to me. I know about Stockholm syndrome, and I have seen the anecdotes about circus elephants becoming agitated and upset if they are freed from their chains, but surely young and vital teens and 20-somethings would not be so dead inside to be like those pachyderms who abandoned any hope long ago, would they?
Sadly I think many of them are truly struggling. Stay sane!!
yes I recently saw something that maintained that the WHO recommended minimum oxygen levels for workers is 19.5% if I remember right. And the article claimed that oxygen levels fall below this within a couple of minutes of donning a mask.
But I don't seem able to find it again. And in searching I keep running across studies etc. claiming masks have absolutely no deleterious effects at all.
They rob humans of natural humanity right there before you get into anything else so that's rubbish, I know. But more on the oxygen thing I can't find right now.
As recently as 2019, less than three years ago, just months before masks were mandated masks were banned outright on public transportation. For good reasons upheld by international courts. Do those rational and legal justifications for banning them not apply today?
2014
"Judges at the European court of human rights (ECHR) have upheld France's burqa ban, accepting Paris's argument that it encouraged citizens to "live together".
The law, introduced in 2010, makes it illegal for anyone to cover their face in a public place...the law was not aimed at the burqa or veil but any covering of the face in a public place...
...The European judges decided...that the preservation of a certain idea of "living together" was the "legitimate aim" of the French authorities.
Isabelle Niedlispacher, representing the Belgian government, which introduced a similar ban in 2011 and which was party to the French defence, declared both the burqa and niqab "incompatible" with the rule of law.
Aside from questions of security and equality, she added: "It's about social communication, the right to interact with someone by looking them in the face and about not disappearing under a piece of clothing."
The French and Belgian laws were aimed at "helping everyone to integrate", Niedlispacher added."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/01/france-burqa-ban-upheld-human-rights-court
2019
"On August 1, 2019, the “Act Partially Prohibiting Face-Covering Clothing,”also known as the “Burqa Ban,” entered into force in the Netherlands. The Act prohibits the wearing of clothing that completely or partially conceals the face in spaces where people are expected to communicate with each other. Thus, face-covering clothing is banned on public transportation and in educational, governmental, and nursing care institutions, but is still allowed in such public spaces as on train platforms. The ban applies to burqas, niqabs, full-face helmets, balaclavas, and masks, but not to headscarves."
https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2019-08-27/netherlands-burqa-ban-enters-into-force/
Until facial coverings are banned outright the manipulated and coerced psychosis that has taken hold of our society will remain. Faces are necessary, are a requirement for public life, for civil society. The rationale that international courts found true just before Covid still applies. It never stopped applying.
Actually, I don't think face coverings should be banned if people want to wear them.
Control of the sheeple.
"This is because SARS-2 is primarily transmitted aerosols; it works like a gas that fills indoor spaces. Only N95 or FFP2 respirators have any chance of stopping the inhalation of these microscopic particles" - and unless you also wear a mask to protect your eyes the infection can atack through that method - your mucous membranes - this was also well know at the time.
There is hope, however.
Last summer when the CDC said that vaxxed people could go maskless, nearly everybody around here did so. The few people who were still wearing masks were VERY VERY uncomfortable being the ones standing out.
At some point, the 'go along' people will see that to go along, they need to ditch the masks. Once they do that, the 'true believers' will suffer the consequences of their actions. My guess is they will submit much quicker than we did. ;)
Masks amplify fear. Here's the science behind them, psychological. More precisely, behavioral science. Not medical science. Social sciences, not natural sciences. Our self-proclaimed betters use behaviorism to "fix" our ignorant, flawed perspectives - to protect us, of course, for our own good. These manipulators of the mind don white robes and stethoscopes masquerading as hard scientists who follow the scientific method of the natural world. This is the actual science of it. Some call it fear amplification as non pharmaceutical intervention. I call it compulsory terrorism.
This study gets into the scientific background on the importance of faces, visible expressions, for a healthy society and healthy social interactions. A 2009 research study titled, "Of snakes and faces: An evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear." This study supports the very same rationale the international courts upheld the burqa bans for. A healthy society requires faces be seen. Not just eyes. Full facial expressions are an essential form of human communication and stabilizes society. And perhaps most importantly, human aggression is moderated by full faces.
In the study they refer to masked faces. Not in terms of an actual facial covering, but in terms of unnatural neutral faces that intentionally don't communicate any emotion in situations when facial expressions are customary and expected. Point is, yes, they've terrorized us no differently than if they've made us look at snakes all around us all day, every day. It takes constant higher reasoning reminders to self to push through the fear and anxiety masked faces creates just as surely as if surrounded by snakes all the time, even at an subconscious level.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2009.00784.x
Very interesting. A friend who had a violent childhood has spoken about how seeing masked men especially if wearing black masks with a head covering was very frightening and threatening to her. Maybe she's not the only one!
Pretty amazing how a research study on masked faces confirms what everyone knew from common sense prior to 2020. Masked person in a bank - frightening and terrifying. Masked person on a plane - frightening and terrifying. Masked person on subway - frightening and terrifying. Masked person approaches in a parking lot - frightening and terrifying. Masked intruder in your house - frightening and terrifying.
Who'd have ever thought masks evoked fear without a research study? Or that epidemiologists using the behavioral science techniques and tools they study in order to change public behavior during a pandemic would recommend masks to amplify the public's perception of fear of other people so the unsophisticated masses would stay away from each other (falsely) believing they are reducing transmission rates.
Fear was chosen as primary non pharmaceutical intervention public policy. Masked faces scream fear more effectively than any other symbol. A universal symbol of fear. And submission. The perfect prerequisites for the imposition of authoritarianism. What FDR cautioned a frightened nation to not succumb to as totalitarianism was sweeping the globe, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Instead, the leaders we suffer today demand we be fearful and enlist each of us to spread fear. Fully aware of how fear gives them license to impose authoritarianism, that people willingly embrace authority when made fearful. Which tells us everything we need to know about the intentions of the leaders we suffer today. Authoritarianism is their objective. Manufacturing the consent of free people to become subjects to their rule. Willingly. Psychological manipulation. Though it's no more willing than those who are coerced into signing contracts against their interests. You know, how contracts are null and void if signed under duress or coercion? Not really willingly consenting to become subjects.
like
4. CONTROL. The authorities wanted control. They wanted submission to their authority. They wanted to enforce obedience. (Especially when masks became an "us" vs "them" identifier, they wanted their enemies brought to heel.) And requiring masks was a thoroughly visible sign of obedience and submission.
Masks work like the old Chinese habit to wear a hair queue to show obedience to the Emperor. You could choose between wearing a queue or be decapitated.
It was to show obedience to the foreign Manchu Ching dynasty that had conquered China. When the 1911 revolution ended Ching rule, almost all men got rid of their queues very quickly.