Scamdemic
This subsection contains posts I wrote during the Great Covid Scamdemic of the early 2020s. As you will see, I was very angry and sarcastic about what was going on, and wrote about it in a white-hot fury. I’m still angry about what happened (and is still going on), but the fury has died down.
The Uncivil War
Greetings, worthy opponents! We at the Ministry of Truthiness now wish to address our opponents for a change, instead of just propagandizing our Pfizer Pfaithful, as we usually do. We’re impressed by your attempts to uncover our plans for total control, but you’ve gone far enough, and we’ve come up with our own plan to foil you. You see, we don’t have an ideology other than that aforementioned total control. We’re not left, right, or centrist – we just want to control every aspect of your lives. We’ve found, through trial and error, that the best way to do that is to atomize you, sow discord, make you dehumanize each other, and in general distract you from our plans by getting you to spend your lives fighting each other over other stuff.
April 19, 2023
Smartphones Seen As Evil
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) Some writers, like Simon Elmer, have argued that smartphones are the mechanism that government will use to implement a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), digital ID, and other mechanisms of total control over every aspect of our lives. Elmer recommends dumping our smartphones and replacing them with “dumb” phones. Besides the surveillance and control aspects of smartphones, they are also purveyors of Standard Narrative Propaganda disguised, as usual, as a “convenience”. Digital assistants like Siri, or news apps like Apple News, function as a single source of truth, a kind of digital Jacinda Ardern:
April 16, 2023
How to avoid Twitter and Reddit URL censorship
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) For at least the entire three years of the scamdemic, and possible longer than that, Reddit has been censoring URLs for web sites that they don’t like, such as Bitchute and Rumble. A sysadmin for a Covid dissenters’ Reddit group that I belong to created a workaround for this: a Javascript program on their own personal web site that redirected obfuscated “naughty” URLs to their actual destinations. This redirection service allowed us to avoided Reddit’s censorship bots.
April 8, 2023
Mask Quacks
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In the past several months, I have accompanied a friend to several medical clinics associated with NVRH (Northern Vermont Regional Hospital) in St. Johnsbury. These clinics still require the useless and harmful wearing of masks for all patients and visitors. By promoting masks, these medical clinics are, in effect, the homes of quacks, and, amazingly, the last refuge of maskers. You’d think they would be the first to follow their own mantra of “Trust The Science”, but you’d be wrong. (The mantra is wrong in any case, because science is not settled orthodoxy written on stone tablets; it is a method of determining the truth about the world and is always subject to skepticism, correction, and revision.)
April 4, 2023
Who Dunnit?
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) [Update: Here are two articles that articulate my position much more clearly and thoroughly: Toby Rogers: Mapping the different theories of the case in the medical freedom movement Hugh Willbourn: Cock-up, Conspiracy or Murmuration?] Many of us who have resisted the Covid insanity for the last three years have been struggling with the question of responsibility: who is responsible for this insanity? Answering this question could be helpful in ensuring that this insanity doesn’t happen again.
April 1, 2023
The Prisoner
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post, except for a tiny bit at the end.) “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.” “Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages. Who’s standing beside you now? I intend to discover who are the prisoners, and who are the warders.” The above are quotes from Number 6, the main character played by Patrick McGoohan in the classic British TV show from the 1960s, “The Prisoner”. Growing up then, and having started to read a fair amount of science fiction, I was fascinated by this show. Watching it now (it’s available on Kanopy, a streaming service that our library subscribes to), it seems to be ever more relevant and prescient.
March 24, 2023
Exhaustion
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) Lately I’m finding it too exhausting to write about the endless insanity of the seemingly undying narrative around the Worst Disease Ever. There are signs of tiny cracks in the wall of propaganda, but the change is so slow that I’m now convinced that I won’t live long enough to see the return to sanity. Just when I think things are getting better, some new pack of lies gets pushed out in the mainstream media (raccoon dogs!), or we get some new distraction to keep us from thinking too hard (Ukraine! UFOs! J6!).
March 18, 2023
Survivorship Bias
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post, except for a tiny bit at the end.) One good thing about the fake “pandemic” is that I’m learning about the various ways one can lie with statistics. Brian Mowrey, the author of the excellent Unglossed, mentioned something called “survivorship bias” in his article about stillbirths in Singapore: Literally any “intervention” can appear to make pregnancy “less risky” simply by being applied mid-way through the window. If you resolve to give cupcakes to soldiers in the middle of a battle, your cupcake-receiving soldiers will survive more than the soldiers who started off at the beginning of the battle, because they have already lived to the point of your arriving to give them a cupcake. Sadly, this does not mean your cupcakes are protective, and you should not market them as such.
March 3, 2023
How to Ignore Reality
Greetings, pFizer pFaithful! We at the Ministry of Truthiness want you to guard against misinformation about reality that contradicts our own version of reality, otherwise known as The Science™. What should you do when evil right-wing conspiracy-theorizing domestic terrorist nutcases say Bad Things about our response to the Worst Disease Ever or the Glorious Goo or face diapers, and try to show you studies proving their point? Here are some useful strategies:
February 21, 2023
Some Sanity in Vermont's Musical World
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) For a while now I’ve been whining about two classical music organizations here in Vermont that implemented jab mandates. The first was the Rochester Chamber Music Series, right here in my adopted hometown. The second was the Sonata Piano Camp, in Bennington (about a two hour drive south of here). Both of these organizations have have taken a lot of my money in the past, but apparently they don’t want my money any more because I’m an unclean plague rat.
February 16, 2023