Cue the ‘Paw Patrol’ Theme

Posted on | March 24, 2023 | 1 Comment

Whenever we mention CNN on The Other Podcast, the Paw Patrol theme song is featured to mock the news network whose programming gets lower ratings than the Nickelodeon kiddie cartoon.

Feb. 23: Obligatory CNN Mention
Feb. 17: CNN: Making News (Not in a Good Way)
Feb. 16: More Bad Headlines About CNN
Feb. 15: Report: Jake Tapper’s Executive Producer Fired in Latest CNN Sex Scandal
Nov. 30: Post-Election Bonfire of Schadenfreude: ‘Hundreds’ Being Laid Off at CNN
Aug. 18: ‘Mashed Tater’: Ace of Spades Frantically Seeks New Target of Fat Jokes as CNN Axes Unpopular Pudgy Bald Guy

Has it been a whole month since I updated readers on the never-ending woes of the perpetual last-place cable network? Well, in case you missed it, CNN hit a 10-year low in its ratings in February, but the bad news didn’t stop there. The network’s former “rising star,” Don Lemon, continues flailing hopelessly on “CNN This Morning”:

CNN tapped two veteran executive producers on [March 13] to oversee Don Lemon’s ratings-challenged and controversy-marred “CNN This Morning.”
Longtime CNN producer Lauren Mensch and Chris Russell, who recently was the executive producer for NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert,” will grab the reins from Eric Hall, according to the cable news network.
The moves come amid a flurry of bad publicity for Lemon.
The host infamously put his foot in his mouth last month by claiming GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley was not “in her prime,” which not only upset co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins but ignited a firestorm of criticism that led to Lemon publicly apologizing and being sent to “formal training.”
His tone-deaf remark was ridiculed [March 12] by Michelle Yeoh in her acceptance speech after the 60-year-old Malaysian star won the Oscar for Best Actress.
“This is proof that dreams, dream big, and dreams do come true. And ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you’re ever past your prime,” said Yeoh in an apparent jab at Lemon.
Lemon also reportedly had an off-air blow-up with Collins and has made several on-air gaffes since the revamped show was launched last November.

When CNN needed someone to fill in on a primetime slot, they didn’t bother with Don Lemon, and instead picked Kaitlan Collins for the spot. Don’s basically a punch-line for a joke these days, and did I mention that he’s now on double-secret probation?

Don Lemon is on thin ice at CNN… https://t.co/IzuVLVXdBF

— TMZ (@TMZ) February 23, 2023

It’s just a matter of time before CNN finally figures out nobody wants to watch Don Lemon — morning, afternoon or night — and he gets fired.

Learn to code, baby.

Category: CNN

The Ignorance of Professor Paul Campos

Posted on | March 24, 2023 | Comments Off on The Ignorance of Professor Paul Campos

Excuse the poor quality of that screencap, but Professor Campos was Skyping into his interview with Bloomberg, and apparently didn’t have a lot of bandwidth. He is a tenured law professor in Colorado, and writes at the left-wing blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, where this week he cranked out a doozy. The headline asks, “Are Drivers Getting Worse Because Americans Are Getting Worse?” When I saw that headline, I kind of half-expected a commentary on declining intelligence — dysgenesis, the end of the “Flynn Effect,” the sort of thing Steve Sailer might write for VDare — but alas, no. Reacting to a news item about a deadly car crash, Campos unleashed this sadly predictable rant:

This is purely impressionistic, but I’ve been struck by what seems — again, no data — to be a marked deterioration in driving habits, especially since the beginning of the pandemic, when traffic enforcement fell to practically nothing for many months. I see people driving 100+ mph on the highway regularly; people running red lights three seconds after they’ve changed; drivers conducting elaborate text conversations on their phones while purportedly navigating their vehicles at the same time; and wildly aggressive driving of all kinds, etc. etc.
I wonder about the extent to which these changes, to extent they’re actually happening, may be a product of a more general sense of a collapse of social mores of various kinds — basically the MAGA let your fascist freak flag fly effect spilling over into lots of areas of social life.
What’s the difference after all between nobody can tell me to wear a mask and nobody can tell me to not drive 30 miles over the speed limit? They’re both symptoms of oppositional defiance disorder raised to the level of ideology, I suppose.

Oh, so Trump is to blame? The bad drivers causing accidents on our nation’s highways are letting their “fascist freak flag fly”? Is that really your argument, Professor Campos?

Because, you see, although I am merely a journalist, and not a tenured law professor, I’m capable of something we call “research,” and am also possessed of a sufficient amount of geographical knowledge to notice the dateline on the news item about the car crash that inspired your rant:

BALTIMORE – Six people died when a car crashed into a work zone Wednesday afternoon on the inner loop of I-695 in Baltimore County.
According to Maryland State Police, around 12:40 p.m., a car drove in between temporary placed jersey walls and struck multiple construction workers before overturning.

Baltimore? MAGA voters with “oppositional defiance disorder” are letting their “fascist freak flag fly” in Baltimore? What part of you’ve got to be fucking kidding me do I need to explain here? But first the facts:

Maryland State Police identified the six contracted highway workers who were killed Wednesday when two cars collided on Interstate 695, causing one vehicle to flip into a construction area.
The construction workers were identified as Rolando Ruiz, 46, of Laurel; Carlos Orlando Villatoro Escobar, 43, of Frederick; Jose Armando Escobar, 52, of Frederick; Mahlon Simmons III, 31, of Union Bridge; Mahlon Simmons II, 52, of Union Bridge and Sybil Lee Dimaggio, 46, of Glen Burnie.
The six highway workers were in a construction zone on I-695, north of the beltway exits onto I-70 and Security Boulevard, at about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday when they were struck by a gray Acura operated by Lisa Adrienne Lea, 54, of Randallstown. Police said she was attempting to change into the leftmost travel lane when she struck a Volkswagen operated by Melachi Brown, 20, of Windsor Mill, causing the Acura to lose control and flip into the work zone.

While the accident is still being investigated, it appears from the video that both Brown (in the far-left lane) and Lee (in the center lane) were speeding. As they approached the work zone, there was a slower vehicle in the center lane which Lee wanted to pass. She attempted to change lanes to her left, but apparently didn’t check her blind spot, so that the left rear bumper of her car hit the front right bumper of Brown’s car — she “self-PITted,” as my brother said when I told him about it.

A simple bit of Google searching will tell you that the population of Randallstown is 80% black and Windsor Mill is part of the Milford Mill community, which is 83% black, and while we don’t have mug shots of these two drivers, they’re probably not Trump voters, IYKWIMAITYD. Joe Biden got 62% of the vote in Baltimore County and 88% of the vote in the city of Baltimore, so if you’re looking for fascist MAGA drivers running amok, you probably need to look elsewhere.

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 03.23.23

Posted on | March 24, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.23.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #2027
357 Magnum: Oklahoma Bill Makes It Easier To Arm Teachers
EBL: Quo Vadis, also, Daisy Jones & the Six
Twitchy: Ray Epps Demands Tucker Carlson Retract “Defamatory” Statements & Apologize On Air, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) Insists She’s Fighting Against Slavery Today That Still Exists, and AP’s Chief Political Reporter Gets Snubbed By Gov. DeSantis At Book Signing
Louder With Crowder: Resurfaced clip shows Jazz Jenning’s mom casually explaining forcing Jazz to dilate her rot pocket, Texas University cancels drag show after president compares it to “blackface” and students are freaking out about it, and Woke specimen freaks out on her PawPaw for watching a “sexist movie,” doesn’t think she’s the *sshole
Vox Popoli: The Gatekeeper Makes His Move, Preemptive Bank Bailout, and AI Wants to be Free
Stoic Observations: Trash & Treasure
Gab News: Smoke, Mirrors, & Fake News About AI

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Real Surprise Behind Lauren Boebert’s Latest Controversy, also, What Has Washington Learned from Iraq?
American Greatness: Questions Without Answers About Ukraine, Military Officials Claim Diversity Training Makes Soldiers Feel ‘Included’, and FBI Found No Credible Threats After Investigating Dozens of Protesting Parents
American Thinker: Evil Medicine, The Worst Prison Is the One You Don’t Know You’re In, Government Isn’t the Victim; It’s the Perpetrator, and Dodging the Apocalypse
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Royal Navy News
Babalu Blog: Inflation rate of 72.6% makes food unaffordable for Cubans, MLB to pay each WBC Cuban national baseball team player $25,600, Cuban dictatorship whines about ‘vile and organized’ freedom of expression at Miami baseball game, and Americans come to the defense of Cuban communists at the WBC game in Miami
BattleSwarm: Square Zero
Behind The Black: First set of SpaceX’s second generation Starlink satellites experiencing issues, Russia launches military satellite, Ingenuity completes 48th flight on Mars, NASA engineers continue to struggle to save the Flashlight lunar probe, and Today’s blacklisted American: Black DEI administrator fired by college for demanding accuracy and color-blind policies
Cafe Hayek: More On Hayek
CDR Salamander: The 2024 Defense Budget – A Mixed Bag For The Navy
Da Tech Guy: Trump Trumping Allen Bragg Highlights the argument in Favor of His Nomination. He Fights!, also, To protest or not to protest, that is the question
Dana Loesch: Nikki Haley Says America Should Have Responded To Russian-Downed Drone With Fighters & The Fleet, also, Democrats Praise ATF During Oversight Hearing On Agency’s Abuses
Don Surber: Don’t Save The Banks
First Street Journal: Killadelphia – Everyone wants to talk around the problem, without ever telling the truth
Gates Of Vienna: Enricher vs. Enricher Knife-Play in Milan
The Geller Report: Soros DA Alvin Bragg POSTPONES Today’s Noon Trump Indictment Hearing Again, Hunter Biden Used FBI Mole Named “One-Eye” To Tip Him Off to China Probes, Trans Biological Male Wins Female Cycling Event in NYC, CRUSHES Competition, and AZ Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Kari Lake In Election Case
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, What Does California Have Against Unicorns?, and And I Thought I Was Past My Sell By Date
Hollywood In Toto: Crave Comedy? Here’s Where to Find It (Without Filters)
The Lid: Woke California Assembly Thinks Police Dogs Are Racist
Legal Insurrection: San Francisco Asian Americans are Frustrated With Democrats: ‘They Forgot the Core Problems for Regular People’, Dem-Led Colorado City Allowing Only Six Gas Stations in the Name of Climate Change, Biden Laughably Blames ‘MAGA Republicans’ for Problems at the Border, Says His Budget Provides Border Security, Georgetown U. Adding “Social Justice Emphasis to Existing ‘Diversity’ Core Requirement”, and Law Professor Might Report the Stanford Law Students Who Shouted Down Judge to California Bar
Nebraska Energy Observer: Sadness
Outkick: Adam Wainwright Joins Growing List Of Players To Miss MLB Time Thanks To WBC Injuries, A Win For Women: World Athletics Bans Transgender Athletes From Female Events, UConn Basketball Refuses To Stay At NCAA-Booked Hotel In Las Vegas After Discovering Vomit ‘And Worse’ In Rooms, Tom Brady Is Now Part Owner Of The WNBA Champion Las Vegas Aces, and Deion Sanders Casually Benches 245 Pounds At 55 Years Old While Wearing Winter Coat And Chains Without Warming Up
Power Line: Giving it up for Walz, Did the New Yorker Just Sink Harvard?, and Dumbing Down the Judiciary
Shark Tank: “Universal School Choice” Bill Heads For DeSantis’ Desk
Shot In The Dark: Mister Bad Example, also, Things Continue To Go Just Great!
The Political Hat: Public School Pimps – Gay Sex For 6th Graders, Surveying Middle Schoolers About Their Sexual Experiences, and Fit For Students But Not The Adult Public
This Ain’t Hell: Is the U.S. Navy ready for the China challenge?, Axis of Idiots, The FBI falsely labels a veteran as a facilitator of domestic terror, and Scraping the Bottom
Transterrestrial Musings: Canceling Drag Shows, also, On The General Narcissism Of Sensitivity Readers
Victory Girls: Sinema Mocks Democrats And They Can’t Stop Her
Volokh Conspiracy: Idaho Supreme Court Rules Fourth Amendment Violated When Drug-Sniffing Dog “Intermeddled” With Defendant’s Car
Watts Up With That: Deforesting To Save The Planet? Europe’s Forests Shrinking as Wood Used For “Green” Energy
Weasel Zippers: Kamala Harris Marks Women’s History Month With Another Bizarre Word Salad, also, Ted Cruz Decimates Buttigieg At Senate Hearing On Train Derailment
The Federalist: Granholm Testimony Shows White House More Focused On Banning Gas Stoves Than Energy Security, Fairfax Public Schools Violate Executive Orders By Hiding ‘White Guilt’ Lesson Plans From Parents, House Republicans Dispel Democrats’ Lie Smearing GOP Poll Watchers As Threats To Democracy, Washington Post Found A Lot Of Happy Transgender People, If You Don’t Count Those Who’ve Committed Suicide, and Virginia Democrats Attack Hindu Immigrant For Supporting The ‘Remarkable’ U.S. Constitution
Mark Steyn: Media Omertà

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Category: Linkagery

Best Headline Ever?

Posted on | March 23, 2023 | 2 Comments

Sure, it’s The Babylon Bee, but is it really satire? Because ever since Donald Trump ~~beat~~ stole the election from Hillary Clinton in 2016, it does seem as if Democrats want to criminalize opposition. Yet they appear to be oblivious to the irony of protecting “Our Democracy” by outlawing dissent. Protesting against Democrats is an “insurrection,” and they will have the FBI shut down your social media account to prevent you from criticizing their agenda. With Merrick Garland as Attorney General, the FBI is using undercover agents to infiltrate the defense team of accused “insurrection” defendants. So not only will you get arrested if you protest against Democrats, but agents of the Department of Justice will violate your right to a fair trial, to make sure that Joe Biden’s enemies go to federal prison. That’s what Our Democracy means, right?

Holy sh*t this is beyond dirty.

DC US Attorney Matthew Graves' office notified defense team TODAY that a defense witnesses has been an FBI informant since the BEGINNING of the case thru start of trial.

"The CHS participated in prayer meetings with…the defendants' families." pic.twitter.com/6bso3gpRef

— Julie Kelly ?? (@julie_kelly2) March 22, 2023

While prosecuting dissenters and systematically depriving them of due process, the Democrats in charge of the Department of Justice apparently can’t be bothered to do anything about President Biden’s family members collecting illegal bribes from agents of the Chinese Communist Party.

Reality has become so weird, it’s impossible to parody.

Category: Democrats

Violence Against Women Update: Some Cases Are Just So … Unpredictable

Posted on | March 23, 2023 | 1 Comment

Say hello to 40-year-old Robert Castillo, a Minnesota resident who we might guess, based on the prominent tattoo on his neck, is a member of the notorious Latin Kings gang. You might be surprised (but probably not) to learn that in 2001, “Castillo was charged with first-degree assault for stabbing a 22-year-old man in his back, head and neck in Vadnais Heights. Castillo accused the man of telling his girlfriend he’d brought another woman to their apartment complex, according to a criminal complaint.” Gosh, whoever could have guessed that such a fine-looking fellow as Robert Castillo might have a criminal record?

As you recover from your sense of astonishment, brace yourself for the revelation that Castillo’s sister told police that he “had a thing about carrying a knife all the time to protect himself.” You may ask, protect himself from whom? Well, it turns out the police were looking for Castillo — I’m sure this is shocking news to you — because “he had an active Department of Corrections warrant for alleged violations of conditions of his release.” This had nothing to do with the 2001 stabbing incident, however, but rather because he had “received a 10-year sentence” for a 2014 incident in which he assaulted a woman with a hammer.

So let’s add up the clues here:

2001 stabbing a man;
2014 attacking a woman with a hammer;
Warrant for his arrest on probation violation;
Carried a knife all the time “to protect himself”
and
Latin Kings tattoo on his neck.

Keep your heart medication handy, folks, because you might go into cardiac arrest when I tell you that Robert Castillo had been arrested again, and is this time charged with murder after he stabbed his girlfriend 20 times during a Bible study at his sister’s home:

Castillo’s sister, who lives at the residence, told police they host Bible study at the home every Tuesday night and Woodhull and Castillo came over for it. They “were acting normally” and Castillo held Woodhull’s hand and kissed her, the complaint said.
They’d been at the home for about 90 minutes before the stabbing and Castillo’s brother also said he hadn’t seen “signs of hostility.” When he returned from the bathroom, he saw Castillo standing over Woodhull with a knife in his hand.
Castillo’s sister said she saw Castillo stab Woodhull with a hunting knife with a 6-inch blade. . . .
While police were taking Castillo to jail Tuesday, he asked an officer, “Is she going to be OK?,” according to the complaint. . . .
When police told Castillo that Woodhull died, he said, “No, she didn’t,” and shook his head in disbelief.

We’re all shaking our heads in disbelief. Who could have predicted that this guy was capable of stabbing a woman to death?

Feminists, who love to lecture us about “violence against women,” have said nothing about this case, for some reason.

Category: Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 03.22.23

Posted on | March 23, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.22.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Earned myself a week in Twitmo for calling Governor Hairgel a demented cretin. I need to be spending less time in that sewer anyway.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Not even your waifus are safe from this perv.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Destruction Of California
EBL: Mayor Pete You Better Watch Your Speed, also, Trump Grand Jury Session Abruptly Cancelled?
Twitchy: Stanford Law DEI Dean On Leave After Failing To Uphold Free Speech Policy, “Dr.” Jill Leaves Cryptic Message On Sleepy Joe’s Shaving Mirror, and Florida School District’s “Donuts & Drag” Event Cancelled After Call From DeSantis Administration
Louder With Crowder: “F***ing arrest me”, Groom exposes bride for cheating on him, airs incriminating video during their wedding ceremony, and Football coach fired for praying on the field gets his job back and is $1.7 million richer
Vox Popoli: Clown World Law, Russia Backs Chinese Reunification, and Plot Twist

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Why the Paleos Were Right About Iraq, also, Showdown at the Lavra
American Greatness: House Judiciary Committee Says ‘No Legitimate Basis’ for Biden Administration to Target Parents Protesting School Boards, Biden Administration Attempting to Bail Out Moderna, and Joe Biden Is Guilty Of Foul Deeds
American Thinker: Philosophy Professor Says ‘Don’t go to College! Become an Electrician.’
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Venezuela’s 21st Century Socialism: Ferraris and starving children, Mexico’s AMLO: Friend or foe?, and As Cubans suffer food shortages, Cuban dictatorship launches agricultural fair
BattleSwarm: Russia’s Rolling Tank Museum
Behind The Black: Virgin Orbit resumes limited operations, Russia’s Luna-25 unmanned lunar lander to be delivered to Vostochny in early June, Confused glaciers in a Martian crater, Hakuto-R1 enters lunar orbit, and Pushback: Doctors blacklisted by government for disagreeing on its COVID mandate policies now fighting back
Cafe Hayek: Revisionist History?, also, Getting 19th-century American Economic History Right
CDR Salamander: Japan Puts A Marker Down In Europe
Da Tech Guy: “Allen Bragg is an Asshole” is not a Reason to Vote Trump in the Primaries
Don Surber: Indicting Trump Is Jumping The Shark,
Gates Of Vienna: Chained to the New Trivium, Vaccine Roulette, Part 2, It Really is a Landslide Victory, and Swedish Court – Police Went Too Far When They Prevented a Koran-Burning
The Geller Report: Democrat Deep State Is Building A Vast Surveillance And Speech Suppression Web Around Every American, also, Biden’s Pentagon to Send Tanks, Missiles to Ukraine on FASTER Timeline As Red China Works For Peace
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Jupiter and the Galilean Moons, and I’m So Old
Hollywood In Toto: It’s Time to Honor D-Day’s’ Boys of Bedford, John Wick: Chapter 4 Shows Series Isn’t Dead (Yet), ‘Greatest Lie’ Silenced by Woke Mob, Media Silent, and Tom MacDonald & John Rich Crush iTunes Chart with ‘End of the World’
The Lid: Whaddayaknow? Joe Signed Off on Hunter/Burisma Statement
Legal Insurrection: FBI Mole Known as ‘One-Eye’ Would Tip Off Hunter About Any China Probes, ‘Derisive, Divisive and Demoralizing Misogyny’, Stanford Law Diversity Dean Placed On Leave, Student Disrupters Will Be Re-Educated Not Disciplined, Biden Administration to Use California as Tool to Smash Existence of Diesel Trucks In The U.S., and Challenges to New York’s End Run Around SCOTUS 2nd Amendment Ruling Argued At Second Circuit
Nebraska Energy Observer: A Brit’s view of the constitution of the United States of America (3)
Outkick: Spencer Rattler Spites Oklahoma Fans With Hope That Sooners Won’t Claim Him As Their Own When He Reaches NFL, Tom Brady, Gisele Split Had Nothing To Do With Football, She Says, Oregon Coach Unloads Fiery Rant About NIT Attendance, ‘World’s Hottest Speed Skater’ Jutta Leerdam Takes Her Off-Season Workouts Under Water, and Bikini Cowgirl Claps Back At Haters Who Say She’s An Inbred
Power Line: Liberals, Stop Trying to Keep Black Kids Down!, Ramirez on the Stanford disgrace, and Comer in shadows
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Democrats For “Assault Weapons”!
Shark Tank: Florida AG Moody Busts $400 Million Medicaid Fraud Case
Shot In The Dark: As Predicted, also, When Reality Is Absurd Parody Is Pointless
The Political Hat: Ohio vs. Diversity Statements
This Ain’t Hell: Newsom pressured to give $360K reparations per, American military to have additional access in the Philippines, Defend the Guard Act, and Three More Accounted For
Transterrestrial Musings: Safety Third, It Should Be Safe To Be Unpopular, and What If All The Presidents
Victory Girls: CBO Suggests Means Testing And Taxing Veterans Disability Payments, MAGA “Christians” Compare Trump to Jesus, and ‘Drag is holy’? Christ is Not A Sock Puppet
Volokh Conspiracy: Alito: “I went to a law school where I didn’t learn any law.”
Watts Up With That: Help Save the Planet – Eat Lentils, also, A Requiem for Blueberries
Weasel Zippers: Liberal Dem Rep. DeLauro Admits Inflation “Killing People,” “People Do Live Paycheck To Paycheck” Under Biden, Biden EPA Wants $375 Million For “Environmental Justice Program”, and Occasional Cortex Horrified Over Rumor She Held A Military Recruitment Fair
The Federalist: The Bipartisan Iraq War Revisionists Are Dead Wrong On Ukraine, How Public Schools’ ‘Equity’ Policies Make It Impossible For Students To Succeed, Biden Admin Plans To Raze Native American Religious Site To Benefit Foreign Mining Group, The Bipartisan Rail Safety Bill Is A Reasonable Response To East Palestine Crisis, and New Video Shows ‘Socio-Emotional Learning’ Fanatics Confirming This Popular School Tool Is A Leftist Trojan Horse
Mark Steyn: The Criminalization of Political Opposition

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Category: Linkagery

The COVID-19 Fetish Community

Posted on | March 22, 2023 | 3 Comments

John Hoge blogged about the person pictured above with the headline “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know,” and yet at first, I didn’t believe it. Surely, I thought, this must be some kind of satire — a 4chan troll, a parody of extreme COVID-19 paranoia. But then I checked her Twitter timeline and discovered that (a) not only is she real, but (b) she’s part of an online hive of thousands of viral panic-mongers. These people are hoarders of bad news, obsessed with the phenomenon of “long COVID,” and convinced that the pandemic isn’t over yet. Three years since we began “15 days to slow the spread,” followed by “30 days to flatten the curve,” some people still can’t let it go. They’re addicted to fear.

Well, the good news is: I’m not dead yet. And since you’re reading this, obviously, you’re not dead, either. Back in September 2021, I got the Moderna vaccine, because I didn’t want to give the “Lockdown Forever” crowd any excuse to cite me as a statistic of “vaccine resistance.” The virus didn’t kill me, and the vaccine didn’t kill me, either, but when they started promoting COVID-19 booster shots, I was like, “Hold up there.”

All these new variants kept being reported — Delta, Omicron, etc. — and we were told that we needed more shots to fight the new variants. Meanwhile, there were reports of so-called “breakthrough” cases, where people got COVID-19 despite their prior vaccinations, even as there was talk of making the vaccine mandatory, and it was just about this time that I began to suspect it was all a racket. The push for 100% vaccination and even mandatory boosters was really about profits for Big Pharma.

Far be it from me to spread “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories,” but when an industry lobbies government to make their products mandatory? Wake up and smell the corruption.

Probably a lot of other people reached a similar conclusion, but regardless of whether they see the mandatory vaccine campaign as a Big Pharma scam, nearly everybody agrees: It’s over.

No more lockdowns. No more masks. No more panic-inspired testing of people every time they come down with a case of the sniffles.

We’re done with that, and we’re not going back, ever.

Raise your hand if you never once got tested for COVID-19.

See, that’s the dividing line. Over the past three years, I had one or two mild colds, but a couple of days of a runny nose and a cough never inspired me to rush out and get tested for COVID-19. For all I know, any one of those might have been a COVID-19 case, but if so, it wasn’t too much for my immune system. And since we’re talking about “The Science,” is there any reason to believe that the Wuhan lab was able to mutate the virus to such an extent to render normal human immune responses completely ineffective? Is mere exposure to the virus an automatic death sentence? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that most reasonably healthy people who were exposed to the Wuhan bug never experienced severe symptoms, never got tested, never sought medical care, and recovered without ever being counted as a COVID-19 case?

Excuse me for exercising what used to be called “common sense,” a trait that seems to have become much less common. At the core of the COVID-19 panic was a bunch of hypochondriacs, people vulnerable to suggestion, who became obsessed with the virus in the same way that some people develop sexual fetishes about high-heeled shoes, leather, or whatever.

The Internet allows these COVID-19 fetishes to find each other online, to form social-media cliques that turn into echo chambers where it’s 24/7 gloom-and-doom — all fear, all the time. Inside these online echo-chambers, the hypochondriacs feed each other news items — the latest research findings, etc. — that feed their irrational paranoia about the Deadly Super-Virus From Hell. It’s a sort of religious cult, where the voices of common sense are condemned as heresy. In a way, it’s a mirror-image of the cult of extreme anti-vaxxers, a place where True Believers seize upon anecdotal evidence that “proves” their point of view. Yes, there is such a thing as “long COVID,” and yes, some people die from bad vaccine reactions, but as a matter of statistical probability, you’re very unlikely to be affected by either of these phenomena.

It’s like “police brutality.” No matter how many times we’re confronted with claims that racist police have murdered an innocent black man, we know that (a) such cases are statistically rare, (b) cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than the other way around, and (c) the “activists” who seek to turn every such case into an excuse to riot are motivated by hatred, greed and a lust for political power. Knowing the facts is the only way to protect yourself from being manipulated by these dishonest “activists” and their unscrupulous media henchmen.

How is this not a Woody Allen movie https://t.co/XRG7Gzb4gM

— Small Fringe Shoshi ?????? (@shoshido) March 22, 2023

What is to be done about the COVID-19 fetishists, like this lunatic woman with her science-fiction-movie protective gear? Mockery, yes, but other than that, we need to keep a watchful eye on these people for the simple reason that they’re crazy and, as you know, Crazy People Are Dangerous.