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.
An Age of Totalitarian Dictatorships
In 1940, George Orwell wrote: Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships – an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.
December 8, 2021
Safe and Effective
If you should ever doubt that the “vaccines” are safe and effective, please download and run this program to remind yourself to Trust The Science™: #!/usr/bin/env ruby while true; puts "The vaccine is safe and effective"; end
December 4, 2021
Abusive Relationships
The Workplace Mental Health Institute has a handy infographic about abusive relationships. Here it is in text form:
August 4, 2021
Two-tier Society
Even without vaccine passports, we are being nudged into a two-tier, clean vs. unclean, caste society. The CDC has issued guidance for choosing safer activities, and not surprisingly, the unvaccinated are asked to take demeaning, anti-social prevention measures that the vaccinated do not have to undergo. Furthermore, the unvaccinated are described as “less safe” or “least safe” if they attempt to participate in normal social activities. There is no logical reason for this segregation. If the vaccines are really as effective as is being claimed, vaccinated people should not be in any danger. But as we have seen over the past year, logic and reason have had no place in the decisions made by our governments to shut down society.
April 30, 2021
The Illusion of Freedom
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” – Frank Zappa
April 20, 2021
The Purity Cult
Even before the official introduction of “vaccine passports” in this country, we’re already seeing signs of people creating their own private (or sometimes public) versions of these passports. I know of family groups and exercise classes that exclude the unvaccinated, and our state government has imposed rules that are more restrictive for the unvaccinated. These are all examples of what the Britsh scholar Edward Hadas calls the “purity cult” in his essay, The war against Covid-19. As with religious cults, this cult does not use logic to divide the clean from the unclean, the pure from the impure. But unlike religious cults, this one uses the veneer of science, or more accurately, scientism, to explain and vindicate itself. Let’s look at this cult’s anti-logic more closely.
April 6, 2021
The End of Private Life
“With the invention of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”
April 1, 2021
Quarantining books in Koha
In September our little library (which is closed to patrons right now and only does curbside pickup) was asked by the state library agency to put returned books in quarantine when they are checked in. We now move returned books to a “dirty” table, where they are sanitized once a week by a volunteer, then moved to a “clean” table. After resting there for a couple of days, the books are moved to the shelving cart.
March 5, 2021
CDC mortality data for all causes and natural causes
In an earlier post I described how to download CDC weekly mortality data for the years 2014 through 2020 and import them into a MySQL database. The first interesting piece of data I looked at was the number of deaths by all causes and by natural causes for each year. (At the time of this writing, only the data for the first 49 weeks of 2020 are available. To make the comparisons more fair, I used the data for the first 49 weeeks of all the other years.)
January 12, 2021
How to use CDC mortality data without the Internet
The CDC mortality data for the last two years is difficult to find, but thanks to a posting on Lockdown Sceptics I was able to go directly to the data on the CDC site. This site contains death data for all of 2019 and 2020. But the site is bit clunky to use, and some filter condition operators (such as <=) aren’t supported. So I decided to download the raw data and import it into MySQL so that I could run my queries directly. Here’s how I did that:
December 23, 2020