On a Friday morning three weeks ago, after we finished our basketball games at the Y, I sat down alongside Desmond, an intense, graceful Jamaican player who, at 50, is the second oldest of the three dozen men and late teens who play there. As we removed our sneakers and shirts and cooled off, he asked if I had any weekend plans. I told him I was going to my 50th High School Reunion.

Raising his eyebrows, he asked, “You still have friends from back then?”

I said I did, though I noted that for various reasons, including deaths or living very far away, most whom I counted as friends wouldn’t be there.

Desmond turned serious and said that, at his age, he had only one or two real friends. He said that over the years many whom he had considered friends had let him down in various ways. He emphasized that he had often reached out to people who didn’t reciprocate.

—

Who hasn’t pondered what enables us to call someone a “friend” and how many real friends we have? I want friends who say true, insightful things, like to joke and laugh, offer encouragement when it’s needed and share with me an interest or two. I try to be that type of friend to others.

I also share Desmond’s view that a friend checks up on you every once in a while and Desmond’s disappointment when they don’t. I would add that when someone expresses an idea that’s important to them, a friend will be an interlocutor who respectfully listens to his/her friend’s perspective and responds thoughtfully. I like having friends who say things I didn’t know or consider.

—

Since March 18, 2020, I’ve been writing against lockdowns, closures, masks and asymptomatic Covid tests. Since late 2020, I’ve often criticized the “vaccines.”

Last week, I wrote about an email I received from Bill, an old friend who suggested I was selfish for defying Coronamania. I embedded in that post the email I sent back to Bill explaining my stance. Some asked if Bill responded to my email. He hasn’t.

I’ve often shared my anti-Coronamania posts with ostensible friends to see who agrees with me or, if they disagree, to learn how they defend the Covid response. Throughout, few have replied to these posts. In this context, silence connotes disagreement. Most people avoid even mild conflict.

Those who’ve replied summarily emphasized, as Bill did, how lethal they believed The Virus was and how insensitive or incorrect I was to question The Science and the “experts.” But no respondent has gone into any depth or asked me any questions. Some asked me not to send them any more messages on this topic or blocked me.

—

In late June, I attended a memorial service for my old boss, Rick, who died in March after nine years with prostate cancer. After the service, Rick’s family hosted a reception in the church basement. Toward the reception’s end, I approached Paul, with whom I had shared much time over the decade we worked together.

Though he’s 18 years younger than I am, Paul and I had always enjoyed an easy rapport. We had much in common. Our offices were two doors apart and we litigated the same type of cases. We often played lunchtime basketball. We sometimes played outdoor ice hockey and tossed baseballs and footballs, including ritualistic Friday afternoon throws from the eighth-floor balcony to the lobby of our atrium-ed office building. (These were my idea. I’ve always liked a little mischief). Paul and I both played some guitar and piano and found many of the same things funny. We worked together fixing each other’s houses. We talked and typically agreed about a lot of stuff. Ellen and I went to Paul’s wedding and, a few years later, to Philadelphia to visit him and his wife at the hospital after their first baby underwent heart surgery. When his father’s funeral ended, Paul told me he loved me. The feeling was mutual.

When I saw Paul after Rick’s memorial service, he caught me up on how his kids, whom I hadn’t seen since 2019, were growing, cheerleading, playing baseball and raising their new puppy. Hearing from him immediately felt familiar and comfortable. We should still be close friends.

When they toggled the basement light switch to signal us that the reception was ending, Paul earnestly said to me, “Let’s get together and talk again soon.”

Paul knew I had opposed the lockdowns from the outset. When, in Spring 2020, I sent some of my early anti-lockdown posts to him, he was among those who asked me not to send him any more. I stopped reaching out to him. He stopped reaching out to me.

—

Before talking to Paul at the reception, my other former colleagues asked me what I had been doing. I told them I was writing. They asked me what I was writing about. I said, matter-of-factly, “The Covid response and all the harm it did to people.”

Each time, their faces stiffened. No one wanted to discuss that theme, presumably because they supported the “mitigation” and jabs, both then and now.

During my high school reunion a few weeks later, several similar, conspicuously truncated exchanges occurred. My conversational style includes asking questions. Doing so shows interest. Mine is typically genuine. One learns more by listening than by talking. As at my boss’s memorial, my classmates frowned and changed the subject. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that no classmates followed up regarding Coronamania. Though at night’s end, one classmate I barely knew in HS approached me, quietly told me she reads my posts and thanked me for writing these.

—

Mid-reunion, a woman approached me, smiled broadly and greeted me enthusiastically by name. I was slightly embarrassed that I didn’t recognize her. There were many people in our class and time has changed our faces. When Judy identified herself, I remembered her. We had been friendly during our senior year.

For about ten minutes, we spoke comfortably and sincerely about life. She told me that in her twenties she had backpacked the world for a year with her boyfriend/later husband, whom she said has long worked for NIH. She had raised three girls and been a birth doula. I told her I admired such work and that my wife has worked with new mothers for 30 years. Judy said that because she had cared for her parents as their health failed, she might become a death doula. I also admired that.

Prior to the reunion, the organizer had sent a group email requesting that no one discuss “politics.” When Judy excused herself to visit the buffet table, she smiled and said, cryptically and incongruously, “Well, I guess we can’t discuss politics.”

I guess she had seen some of what I’d written and disagreed with it but wanted to avoid conflict at that event. While her objective was situationally appropriate and the Scamdemic clearly had a political dimension, I don’t see my overall message as political. I examine the broad human harm the lockdowns, school closures, jabs and ten-trillion-dollar giveaways have caused.

A few minutes later, we sat at the same table to eat alongside a mutual female friend. We three talked about how our adult kids, and many in their generation, were failing to find mates and create family. We mentioned smartphone/screen distraction and the consumerist nature of dating apps, versus meeting mates organically, as we had done in our twenties.

I wondered why we could discuss the failure to build a new generation but not the Covid lockdowns and closures, especially as those measures prevented the social interactions that lead to relationships that create families. Presumably, mentioning the shots’ role in increasing miscarriages and depleting ovarian reserves would also have been too “political.”

—

Since 2020, I’ve sent some anti-Coronamania posts to another woman classmate who didn’t attend the reunion. Over the years, we’ve discussed multiple topics that would be discussed with very few others. In January 2020, we had another up-close-and-personal three-plus-hour exchange in an Annapolis diner. When the Scamdemic began soon thereafter, she never commented on the handful of anti-mania posts I forwarded to her. After the most recent she replied, only, “Thanks for sharing.”

—

Many other friends or relatives seem to disagree with me about the Covid response but decline to explain why.

I suspect they would proffer the generic, majority response: “Covid was a terrible disease that killed over a million Americans. The lockdowns, closures, masks and tests bought us time until the vaccines saved the day.” And/or “The experts did the best they could, given what they knew at the time.”

I’ve spent the past six-and-a-half years explaining why these rote assertions never withstood even basic scrutiny. Throughout, Coronamania supporters never asked themselves, nor were asked, many obvious questions.

https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/25-questions-for-those-who-fear-the

The Coronamanic were intensively, effectively propagandized. The news coverage was so one-sided and Corona skeptics were so extensively censored that the virus-fearing herd never heard facts or counter-perspectives that should have caused them to reevaluate what the Covid freakout. Forsaking logic, the Covophobic naively believed the media and resolutely obeyed the government.

—

As have many of you, over the past six-and-a-half years, I’ve lost/abandoned a series of friendships and spent less time with some relatives due to typically unexplored disagreements regarding the Covid “mitigation” or shots. The majority, who bought into the overreaction, decided that those who opposed lockdowns, school closures, masks, shots and massive government giveaways were stupid, evil and not worth talking to.

Shunning those who didn’t buy the mania made the Covophobes feel virtuous. They imagined that we viral heretics would change our behavior based on a desire to be welcomed back into their Science-loving tribe. They were deceiving themselves. People like me won’t disregard the truth, wishing that misguided others might like us if we went along with their lunacy.

By adopting what they perceived to be the prevailing view, the Coronamanic substituted the emotional protection of the herd for inquiry, knowledge and reason. Swept up in mob mentality, they peremptorily supported the theatrical, destructive “mitigation” and universal injection. Not only did they refuse to hear the perspectives of those who disagreed with the crisis narrative or the mitigation dogma, many wished us dead. This fantasy was predictably unfulfilled.

—

Over six decades, I’ve talked with innumerable friends about countless topics, e.g., personal challenges, family strife, goals, the meaning of life or whether or not they liked a given musician, sports team, vacation spot, movie or cuisine. Yet oddly, friends and family refused to talk about the most bizarre and consequential disruption of their lives. Serious exchanges about the Covid response were further out-of-bounds than those regarding religion.

Those who refused to engage either never considered that I might present some unknown facts or previously unconsidered perspective that might show that the Corona response was a massive overreaction. Or they didn’t want to defend their position or acknowledge, for example, either the absence of Covid deaths among remotely healthy people or why so many who injected got sick and spread The Virus.

While it was easy to foresee how the Covid response would cause far more harm than good, the vast majority failed to think critically about the consequences of viral hysteria. Time has comprehensively vindicated my and other lockdown/mask/test/shot skeptics’ analyses. These were easy calls.

—

I recently sent the following email to one of the handful of old friends who had criticized the Covid response:

I've abandoned most of my old friendships over the Scamdemic. It's hard to overlook peoples' fearfulness and gullibility or their unwillingness to admit they overreacted and wouldn't calmly discuss this when it might have mattered.

She replied:

It is disappointing that people who gave in to the covid propaganda are unwilling or unable to admit or see that they were wrong. But I try to let it go and hope that one day they can reach that reality and be honest. Seems like we should be closer to that now with all of Fauci’s lies exposed. My own daughter was very upset with me for making the decision to not get the shot. Not because she was concerned for me but because it was an implicit rejection of her decision to get it. We have not discussed it for a long time.

Some of those people must be thinking “why didn’t I see it and they questioned it from the beginning?”...maybe those thoughts will lead to more critical thinking. One can hope.

Her approach is more charitable and more optimistic than mine. It may also enable her to sustain the types of friendships I’ve let go. Women more strongly desire friendships and thus, are more likely to avoid, conciliate or deliberately forget conflict than are men.

In contrast, I don’t want friends who place important topics off-limits. I’m unmotivated to preserve relationships underlain by unspoken distrust or disrespect. I also want friends astute enough to see they were repeatedly lied to and who cared enough about the larger group, especially the young, to swim against the viral mania tide and spend some popularity by opposing Covid groupthink. Being around panicky or misinformed people bothers me.

—

I’ve always made friends easily enough. Pre-Scamdemic, many people thought I was insightful, and/or fun and “grounded.” I’d like to think I’m sufficiently unusual that I’m not easily replaced.

Maybe I’m delusional in this regard. But it wasn’t me who agoraphobically hid in my house, obsessively sanitized my hands and groceries, imagined I could block viruses by bumping elbows or wearing cloth over my face for months, insisted that kids be isolated from each other for 18 months or took or supported mandating a series of experimental injections with no long-term safety record to prevent a disease that had functionally zero chance of killing anyone healthy under 65. Et al.

Those who’ve crossed me off their friend list since March 2020 did what they felt they needed to do. So be it. Logistically, one can sustain only so many friendships. Thus, from a volume standpoint, it’s not hard for either me or the Coronamanic to lose some friends. I’ve made interesting, smart, new ones to take the places of those who mistakenly dismissed me as selfish, reckless, stupid or MAGA.

Similarly, there are many in the mega flock of Covid sheep whom others can befriend to take my place. By definition, it’s easy to find friends who go along with the crowd. There’s emotional safety in numbers.

But there’s also much foolishness. Exaggerating for effect, Gore Vidal said, “The majority is always wrong.”

This was never truer than during Coronamania.

And as long as my legs hold up, I can hang with the guys at the Y. They’re outgoing, often funny and philosophical and don’t fear the viral reaper.

Several weeks ago, I posted a photo of me in my “I SURVIVED CORONMANIA: UNMASKED, UNINJECTED, UNAFRAID” t-shirt and reoffering these (at cost) to readers who might wear them. Seeking to provoke discussion with those who supported the lockdown/mask/rest/injection lunacy, I forwarded that post to about twenty people whom I suspected would dislike my shirt’s message.

Of these, only one, a high school basketball teammate I haven’t seen in over forty years because he lives in Seattle, responded:

Mark

Nice to hear from you. I always enjoyed playing bball with you on my team cause you were one of those unselfish players- as happy to make a good pass as a layup. I Still wear high top Chuck Taylors...

I am sad to see your dismissal of a real disease. I felt like shit when I had Covid but never had to go to a hospital or anything. On the other hand, two close colleagues of mine died from it. I hope you never get it.

Bill

My old teammate implies that my mockery of Coronamania shows that, post-high school, I stopped being a good teammate and caring about others. Nothing could be further from the truth. From March 18, 2020, my public anti-lockdown, school closure, mask and later, shot stance reflected my strong belief that every aspect of the Covid response would hurt far more people than it helped. That’s why I ridiculed these measures from Day 1 and haven’t stopped doing so.

I replied:

Bill,

It’s good to hear from you.

I often wonder how so many died or got so sick from something I experienced--if one believes the bogus test results--as a 36-hour body ache.

The median ostensible American Covid death occurred at 79.5. The median all-cause death age is 78.5. Under 70, regardless of baseline health, 99.8% of those “infected,” survived. Many under 70 are in poor health. If that cohort were afraid, they could have self-quarantined. Those under 60 were at functionally zero risk. This was all known in March 2020. Yet, most American public schools were closed for 18 months.

Interstate travel bans, one-way store aisles, disinfecting subway cars, et al. It was all very suspicious.

I know many hundreds of people who, in turn, know many hundreds of people. Of these multiple thousands, zero “died of Covid.”

Indirectly, I heard of four--friends of friends--said to have died “of Covid.” One was 96, demented and in a nursing home. The second was 88 with Stage 4 cancer. The third was 75, obese, with congestive heart failure. The fourth was 63 with Stage 4 and already in the hospital for six weeks “when Covid began.”

Such purported Covid deaths were no reason to profoundly disrupt society.

The Covid response was implemented largely b/c it enabled the biggest upward transfer of wealth in history. Over ten trillion dollars were contrived and given away to the already wealthy. The lockdowns themselves killed millions of people via impoverishment/starvation abroad, despair, DIY overdoses, iatrogenic treatment, e.g., extreme sedation, ventilation, dehydration and kidney-stopping Remdesivir, (perhaps this explains the hospital “Covid deaths” of the people you knew), et al. and severely damaged billions of lives, including those of my adult kids.

The media lied throughout about all of this and censored those who pointed out the obvious inconsistencies in the official narrative and the response. For example, if those who thought hiding from others, wearing a mask or injecting a substance with no long-term safety record for another in a long line of unscary coronaviruses protected those who did so, why did anyone care if I refused to go along with this theater?

In this anecdotal vein, (a named high school classmate) died and my mother had a series of strokes within weeks of “vaxxing.” Every one of the 16 people I know who has died over the past five years had been injected. And every injected person I know has “gotten Covid” multiple times. In contrast, my uninjected wife, friends and I have been fine.

I did litigation for 30 years. In that “search for the truth,” every assertion must be proven via competent, cross-examined evidence. Nothing remotely resembling that process occurred “during Covid.” Thus, most of the public naively bought a massive, “trust us, we’re experts” scam. Last week, “the nation’s foremost Covid expert” refused to answer even the most basic Qs about an unprecedented overreaction based largely on his deeply dishonest, strident “recommendations,” made as a federal employee, which directly contradicted what he wrote in contemporaneous emails.

I could go on.

I’m still playing 3-4x/week, mostly with black guys under 30, including many HS and college players. They’re interesting characters who tell me I move well and should shoot more. When I get some warm-up time, I make shots. But as you suggest, the best buckets are created via teamwork. Nothing hurts and it’s fun so I keep doing it. Each time could be my last. If some tendon snaps, I’m done.

At this age, safe passage is not guaranteed, either between the lines or in life. I spoke on this theme at the reunion. It should have been at the core of the Covid reaction. But there was too much money to be made pretending it’s tragic when old people die.

Mark

—

Selfish people supported the Covid response because they enjoyed skipping their commutes and getting paid not to work. They also saw financial and political opportunities. They owned inflation-proof assets that the unwealthy didn’t and knew that mail-in votes could be easily harvested or falsified. They already had found mates. They didn’t care about young people, business owners or those who thrive on interpersonal contact.

They didn’t see the obvious harm that the drastic interventions would cause. They didn’t know that nearly zero baseline healthy people who ‘“got The Virus” died from it. They didn’t consider that despite all of the isolation, masks, tests and shots, many still became ill. They didn’t know that coronavirus vaccines had never worked because viruses evolve.

In contrast, we who opposed the lockdowns, masks, tests, trillion-dollar giveaways and shots saw the extremely low viral risks and the major, lasting downside of all of these measures. That didn’t make us selfish. To the contrary, it showed our ability to think critically and comprehensively about the harm the Covid response would and did cause to billions of people. Doing nothing would have been infinitely better for the human community than all the viral hand-wringing, hysteria and theater.

Throughout the past six-and-a-half years, I’ve been as ready to share a dialogue with those who backed the lockdowns, closures, tests, shots or giveaways as I’ve ever been willing to share a basketball with teammates. But no one who supported these measures has been willing to have such an exchange.

In the late 1980s, I litigated a case in which the federal government had given away many tons of cheese to organizations that agreed to distribute it to needy individuals in their communities. Instead of doing so, one New Jersey NGO, which had no office or staff except for a married couple and their wayward, young-adult son, sold such cheese to an Asbury Park company that manufactured frozen pizzas.

It was later discovered that during the winter, this small-time crime family had stored many boxes of additional government-issue fermented dairy product under the cover of their backyard built-in pool. Extra extra cheese, intended for resale.

Further investigation also revealed that these cheese merchants had also stolen vending machines at gas stations by backing up their van to the machines in the middle of the night, tipping the machines into the van and driving away. Thereafter, they resold the machines and their contents.

That’s only what we found out about. One suspects that these criminal masterminds stole and fenced much more stuff.

—

Many people commit crimes without being caught. Most criminals do multiple misdeeds before they’re arrested or convicted. Some get away with crimes bigger and committed more often than those for which they’re prosecuted. Like OJ Simpson, they end up being punished for offenses far less serious than the ones for which they avoided punishment. It’s rough justice.

—

Thus should it be for Tony Fauci. He deserves to be punished, or at least continually disgraced, for his many Coronavirus lies, which accelerated hundreds of thousands of deaths by advocating isolation and promoting Covid shots and for stealing, via lockdowns, closures and masks, in aggregate, billions of normal, interactive days and nights of from Americans, especially the young. Plus, trillions of economic harm.

By focusing on Fauci’s funding of “gain of function” research, Rand Paul misses the point. Whether The Virus derived from a lab or not, Fauci greatly exaggerated its lethality and serially advocated completely phony and excessive forms of “mitigation.” Nonetheless, any act, including GoF, that reveals Fauci’s deviousness deserves public attention because it shows he’s not that smart and his heart was never in the right place. It’s karma.

Even as evidence of a lab leak mounts and Fauci’s diaries and phone messages are revealed, many bizarrely continue to laud or make excuses for this obnoxious individual. For example, the smug Bill Maher (who designated this nasally bandwagon jumper a voice of reason?) and others have recently expressed sympathy or even support for Fauci.

Maher began by baselessly mocking privacy advocate Rand Paul for exposing Fauci’s emails and phone calls. On cue, Maher’s audience barked and applauded like seals. But work-time communications on government-issued computers and phones aren’t confidential.

Maher and other Fauci apologists continue to assert that, in the “fog of war,” viral mistakes were made and he/we did the best he/we could. This is preposterous. Covid’s distinctly-limited risk profile was known to anyone paying attention in early March 2020. Moreover, Fauci and his flock of clueless followers acted as if the mitigation was based on sound science and logic and that only the ignorant refused to go along. Fauci and others censored the voices of reason who opposed Coronamania’s many forms.

Maher and others also cornily praise Fauci for “decades of public service.” Fauci stayed at NIH because doing so yielded a lavish salary and pension and because he loved wielding power by deciding which favored grantees got slices of the tens of billions in annual NIH research grants for projects of very dubious value. Working in the private sector would have been far less lucrative and much harder.

Others say Fauci is only a scapegoat taking the fall for an international conspiracy orchestrated by Deep State and international operatives. To some extent, he is. But a hitman isn’t blameless simply because someone hired him to kill. And if someone has to personify the Scamdemic, Fauci is a good start. Those who claim to be an expert/leader and fail and lie should expect to be held accountable.

—

Americans’ egos impede a mass Covid reckoning. As they want to avoid guilt or responsibility for supporting Coronamania, most Americans delusionally insist that Fauci “saved millions of lives” or that we should forget Covid and “move on.”

These two stances are denialist foolishness. Even though the little old man isn’t ever going to jail, there are multiple, compelling reasons to continue to discredit Fauci by publicizing his diaries, which even The Atlantic called “excruciatingly embarrassing,” and his texts and by publicly interrogating and criticizing him.

First and foremost, exposing Fauci’s email lies and deletions shows how phony the Covid mitigation and shots were. He knew this when he was pushing these measures. Throughout his Coronamanic reign of terror, Fauci publicly expressed no doubt about his analyses and vilified and censored those who disagreed with him.

If, as Fauci claimed, he was “The Science” and as the media claimed, “The Nation’s Foremost Infectious Disease Expert,” a reasonable observer should conclude after reading his emails and after he repeatedly took the Fifth before a Senate panel, that he and many other public health or medical “experts” were, and remain, wildly overrated. This country runs trillion-dollar deficits to fund entrenched, incompetent, deeply dishonest individuals like him.

Fauci was an undergraduate classics major. Despite often posing in a white doctor’s suit or lab coat wearing a stethoscope, Fauci had precious little clinical experience. His autobiography is 480 pages of delusional self-praise. I’ve never read anything as baselessly, shamelessly conceited.

How does someone like Fauci rise to the top of the bureaucratic heap and stay there for decades? He should have been relieved of his duties at 65 or earlier. He’s the best argument for mandatory retirement. His nurse/wife’s installation as NIH’s Bioethics Director manifests that connections, not excellence, pervade federal, state and local governments.

—

Continuing adverse publicity about Fauci would also remind Americans how inaccurate the media, which turned Fauci into a hero, is. News hosts still protect him by hiding the latest revelations about him and talking over his critics during ostensible “interviews.” I wouldn’t even allow that during a debate.

—

Highlighting Fauci’s false Covid vaxx statements also strongly suggests how overrated all vaxxes are. The shots he so confidently said would stop infection, spread and death failed to fulfill such hype and have caused much injury and death. But because adverse publicity about Fauci and the shots reflects poorly on their industry, Pharma advertisers will lean on media execs to suppress it.

—

Revealing Fauci’s thirst for fame and how his delight in celebrities’ embrace manifests that the media glorifies deeply flawed individuals. Fauci’s rise and fall also shows that those who fawn over celebrities are easily deceived and lack purpose. There are many such people.

—

Exposing Fauci also shows Trump’s, Biden’s, Congress’s, governors’ and state legislators’ poor judgment. Giving Fauci and Birx the microphone and calling them "geniuses” was a poor Trump decision. And what does it say about Trump that he still brags about Operation Warp Speed?

Trump won’t prosecute Fauci because doing so reflects Trump’s failure to call out the Scamdemic when it would have mattered. Biden was/is cognitively gone. Congress spent trillions on Covid nonsense. Most governors and state and local legislators and mayors beclowned themselves with their Covid restrictions and vaxx hucksterism. Very few politicians can credibly defend their Scamdemic performance.

—

Though most people don’t look beneath the surface, the Scamdemic showed how shadowy government entities including DOD, DARPA, the CIA and NIH conspired with WHO, WEF and other multilaterals, banks, unions, Pharma, the media, et al., to sell Coronamania. These entities and their operatives are too big, too obscure and too numerous to prosecute or oust. Demanding to see the manager may work at Walmart but it won’t work regarding the Scamdemic.

Only widespread public rejection of the nonsensical viral response could have thwarted such an extensive conspiracy. Thus, enduring, generalized mass awareness and skepticism are necessary and proper.

To understand the past six-and-a-half years and to have any chance of heading off future scams, Americans and other Coronamanic nations’ citizens need many more years of public examination and ridicule of Fauci and other officials who supported Coronamania. Faucism should continue to be exposed as the major fraud it’s been.

For the reasons stated above, judicial punishment and media correction of the Covid response’s historical record seem unlikely. The media and most Americans will avert their eyes from the viral train wreck they zealously supported.

In the meanwhile, while none of Fauci’s lies are surprising, it’s pleasing to see him disgraced, at least before those who are paying attention to alt news sources. To sustain focus on the phoniness of the entire Covid response, Birx, Collins, Walensky and others should be similarly exposed. Though unlike Fauci, they may have been smart enough to cover their tracks.

Although a few months ago I said wouldn’t do so, last week I uncharacteristically changed my mind and attended my 50th High School Reunion. Someone who had done me a small but important favor during our senior year reached out and urged me to go. I have a good long-term memory and didn’t want to disrespect her, especially because she was driving 1,000 miles, each way, to be there. So I gave in and signed up.

I had very much enjoyed the 20th and 40th Reunions. I also enjoyed this one, though less so because only about one-sixth of those still alive showed up. And 68-year-olds don’t dance. It’s evocative to see familiar sets of eyes and hear familiar voices summarize their lives, which typically have entailed both disappointment and redemption. No one should believe anyone who said that everything had gone great. Understandably, those whom life has beaten down without some degree of redemption don’t travel a long way to tell others how badly it had all gone. And no one would want to listen to unmitigated woe.

During reunions, almost no one reminisces about high school. As they’ve put one foot in front of the other for decades, most have forgotten the specifics of what happened back in the day. Though they do remember how others made them feel.

—

By coincidence, three weeks before the reunion, I experienced something that brought the human life span clearly into focus. In an email to the organizers, I sketched that experience and asked if I could tell the attendees about it to reflect on our collective station in life and to pay tribute to the sixty classmates on the memorial list. The organizers liked the theme enough to allow me to speak as the evening began.

Standing in front of my former schoolmates, I held a beige reusable shopping bag in my hand and said:

Remember in Second Grade, when we did “Show and Tell?” This is Show and Tell, 50th Reunion Edition.

You’re probably wondering, “What’s in this bag?”

I’ll explain in two short stories.

I put the bag on the floor.

A few weeks ago, I was hiking to a swimming hole in a remote NY State Forest with my wife, Ellen. Shortly after entering the thick, balsam-scented woods, we heard a chain saw. We came upon two young men in baseball hats who told us they were cutting up some tall trees that had fallen on the trail during a strong storm a few nights earlier.

Ellen and I resumed walking and found a good place to take our dip.

On the walk back to the car, I saw and picked up a five-inch-thick, ten-inch-diameter cross-section of a 50-foot tree the workers had cut up.

I bent down, opened the bag, revealed the slice and said,

Like a Second Grader, I counted the rings to see how old that tree had been. It had 68 rings.

I told Ellen, “That big tree was exactly as old as I am. I’ve outlived big, old trees.”

When my classmates laughed, I paused and said,

Which means you’ve outlived big, old trees.

They laughed again.

We should be grateful for that. Though it does make the next few years more foreboding and urgent.

As Edgar says in King Lear, “Thy life is a miracle.”

Here’s the second story: In my early twenties, I was a counselor at a sleep-away camp for kids from low-income New York City neighborhoods. Some days we’d play basketball. Each time, the boys, ages 11-12, had a ritual. Before the games began, one would take the ball and announce:

“This one’s for all the brothers who couldn’t be here today.”

Then, he’d take a shot. (I mimicked a shooting motion). And we’d play the games.

I raised the tree slice above my head with my right hand and said:

This one’s for all the brothers and sisters who couldn’t be here tonight.

A bunch of the women spontaneously made that endearing, rising “OHHHH” sound.

I yielded the floor.

—

Well-fed and hydrated, active, purpose-driven people who can, unlike my deceased classmates, avoid heart attacks, overdoses, cancer, car wrecks and homicides, outlive some trees. But as do trees, and as Socrates, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Jr., H.L. Mencken, Stevie Wonder, Ferris Bueller, Novak Djokovic and countless others have observed, we humans live for only so long. If we outlast some trees, that’s a good outcome. If we outlast too many trees, we end up like the aging parents that classmates briefly discussed while talking one-to-one during the reunion: lonely, pain-ridden and/or oblivious.

What made people who, during the Scamdemic, fervently espoused “The Science” overlook Biology’s central, immutable tenet: all living things exist for a limited time.

It was ludicrous to believe a virus could be so exceptionally lethal that we required non-old, healthy people to hide from each other for the first time in history. Nonetheless, on this plainly phony basis, governments stole limited, vital, interactive time from billions of people unendangered by a virus. Or fearful, misled people stole time from themselves.

The median ostensible American Covid victim lived 79.5 years. The average US life lasts 78.5. On a population-wide basis, the human life span isn’t much influenced by the wide array of grossly overhyped public health and medical interventions.

To the contrary, the arrogant, cynical, opportunistic Covid mitigation and shots shortened, not extended, lives and immiserated billions, emotionally, socially and economically. The damage is extensive and permanent. Those who foisted the Scamdemic on the world knew it would turn out this way.

But the majority were too naive to foresee these predictable consequences and forgot that old people die and that, like trees, some do so earlier than others. They followed their TVs and the crowd, not The Science.

Ellen and I recently enjoyed a trip to New Hampshire, Vermont and New York State. I’m thinking of renting a car and moving through Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Eastern Ohio sometime in August. Before I take do, I’d like to know how many of you would like to meet in-person.

I’ve met with many dozens of readers and spoken on the phone to many dozens more. I’ve nearly always enjoyed doing so. Those who read these posts tend to be personable critical thinkers who have led interesting lives. I’ve learned much from them/you. Given the anger the Scamdemic built in me, it’s been uplifting to gather with sane people. Essential, really.

Whether I take, or extend, this trip depends in part on who I might meet and how many days I can devote to such a trip. If you’re interested in sharing a meal or a walk in these regions, please email me at forecheck32 at g mail. Let’s see if we can find times and places that make sense for both of us.

Posting again on Thursday.

Last week, Ellen and I took a ten-day road-trip with stops in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York State. During that time, the New Jersey (home) temperature topped 100 and some heavy storms blew in. In contrast, where we were, it was dry, breezy and below 85. We shared time with my brothers and sister who live up north and walked in woods, swam in lakes and immersed in streams.

We also visited readers who were great hosts. We stayed overnight at the lovely, vintage lake house of warm, astute Susie and Gary and went night swimming. During dinner and breakfast, we discussed many topics, especially family. They told us of their son who lost a job he loved because he declined the shots. They also told us about their daughter who finessed a jab exemption and lived in a tiny, off-the-grid Vermont house, even through the long, cold winters and that she had hiked, in thirty days, the 270-mile Green, Mountainous Vermont Trail, which runs from the state’s northern to its southern border. Barefoot. This was the most incredible thing I’ve heard since governments said we should hide from each other over a virus and most people went along with it.

When I meet with such readers as Susie and Gary, and Jim and Tina in the Hudson Valley, they invariably describe how decades-long friends cut off communication with them when they declined the shots. The shot-shunned still can’t believe how hostile and unwilling to discuss this subject the injectors were. For me, such relationships ended earlier, when the lockdowns began, because I told anyone who would listen that hiding from other people was silly, inhuman, counterproductive and deeply destructive. By the time the injecting started, most old friends hadn’t spoken to me for nine months. I made new ones.

I still don’t understand the hiders’/maskers’/vaxxers’ hate. If they believed these measures protected them, why did they care if others declined to follow suit? They should have simultaneously felt bulletproof and happy that The Deadly Virus would kill off stupid skeptics like us.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Unmasked, uninjected Ellen, I and our few unsequestered, un-face-covered, unjabbed friends have been fine. In contrast, every injector I knew got sick multiple times. Or worse. All of the 16 people I’ve known who have died since early 2021 had been injected. I’m not saying the shots killed all these people; each was over 60 and some were over 90. But the shots didn’t save their lives. And some of these deaths occurred shortly after injection.

—

When people travel, they become more observant than when they’re in familiar territory. During this recent trip, I saw various vestiges of Coronamania.

In some grocery and health food (?!) stores, the cashiers wore masks. The grocery stores displayed signs that said, “BE PREPARED TO TRAVEL. GET VACCINATED HERE.”

As if leaving home unjabbed imperiled either the traveler or the residents of the visited state or country.

When, just west of Massena, NY, we briefly, inadvertently crossed into Canada, Ellen’s phone pinged. Her provider messaged her that being in another country would trigger roaming charges.

This reminded me of stories people told me of their phone pinging the moment they entered other states during the Scamdemic’s interstate travel bans. It still astounds me that some governors pretended they could restrict interstate travel and, worse, that some people took these restrictions seriously, either legally or as a public health measure.

Recalling both the interstate and international travel bans, I wondered what people who feared being in contact with unfamiliar, germy people from, or in, other states think about their government’s current tourism ads seeking to attract microbe-carrying visitors from other states or nations. It’s almost as if tourist-seeking advertisers are admitting that the travel bans and by extension, all the other mitigation and the shots, were complete bullshit.

Come on, just say it. It’s long overdue.

—

While camping in state parks near other people, one smells and inhales smoke from campers burning wood, even on days when it’s 80 degrees and on nights when it’s over 60. Some say burning wood is just what campers do and it makes them happy. The couple nearest us said nothing to each other for the five daylight and nighttime hours they added logs to the fire. They didn’t seem happy.

Others say it’s anti-freedom to oppose campfires. But wood burners pollute the air of those around them. It’s odd to travel from my high-density region to the countryside and find the rural air distinctly worse.

Also, as with viruses, people misgauge wood smoke’s risk. Its nanoparticles are more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke and damage vascular linings that many take statins to ostensibly protect. In contrast, while viruses are said to be ubiquitous, legions pull out all stops in a futile effort to block exposure to these and other microbes that won’t lastingly harm remotely healthy people.

I sent a message to the State Park website complaining about the acrid campground air. A staffer emailed me that it derived from Canadian wildfires. Those fires didn’t occur until a week after we got home. Government officials make stuff up and think you believe them.

Regarding the Canadian fires, instead of squandering hundreds of billions of weak Canadian dollars on the Covid response and persecuting and prosecuting protesting truckers, Canada could have better spent some of that money managing their forests.

—

To “Stop the Spread,” New York State Parks disallowed camping in 2020. In 2021, they gave free two-day passes (total value: $12-$20) to anyone agreeing to inject on the spot. Officials thought some people were very easily bought. Vaxxers also were automatically entered into a $5 million lottery.

Governmental Covid hucksterism was unbelievable. Maybe someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem pathetically funny. But probably just pathetic.

Though it costs $40 for a NY State tent site, we got to camp for free in one such park. We arrived at 6 PM and the office was closed. When I went to pay the next morning, the ranger said, “Nah, don’t worry about it. The computer is broken.”

—

For the first time, Ellen and I “glamped” (a portmanteau for glamour camping) for two nights in Northeastern Vermont. She found this place, last-minute, on her smartphone—credit where credit is due—via Air BnB.

We liked it. The sturdy 8 x 10 x eight-foot-high foot tent was mounted on a platform of 2 x 8s and contained a queen-sized bed. We were surrounded by verdant rolling hills and woods but were only 75 yards from an airy, stylish, all-wood, exposed joists, high-ceiling-ed shared space/repurposed distillery with two showers, a live-edge kitchen counter and dinner table, board games, comfortable reading chairs and a big screen TV. The welcoming and friendly owner left fresh-picked strawberries out for us. We fed watermelon chunks, plus other leftovers to the biggest dog we had ever seen. His owner said the chill canine weighed 195 pounds.

Several times, as we walked the multi-acre grounds, a pair of unfenced, riderless, snorting, neighing horses galloped right past us.

—

When we swam in the refreshing St. Lawrence River, the water was crystal clear. It’s been clarified by zebra mussels released from Russian freight ships’ ballast water. While the water looked great, appearances can be deceiving. Aside from blocking water lines, zebra mussels siphon plankton from the water. Excessive filtration disrupts local food webs because it starves plankton eaters and, by increasing water clarity, makes it easier for visual predators to hunt.

Similarly, despite spending much time outside, hiking and camping, we noticed very few insects during the trip. Insect populations have dropped sharply over the past twenty-five years. Flying insect biomass is said to have diminished by seventy-five percent in many places. Although bugs annoy people, they’re essential ecosystem members. They serve as meals for birds and fish, pollinate plants that humans eat and decompose trees, leaves, garbage and excrement, cycling the nutrients therein.

Many attribute insects’ decline to artificial light, deforestation and insecticide—especially neonicotinoid—use. Pesticide makers are, like Pharma companies, political and media funders. And just as humans have wiped out their microbiomes via antibiotics and poor eating, clearing forests has lessened insect habitat. Nature doesn’t function well when it’s sterilized.

The idea that a society should kill off all bugs with fly swatters, cans of Raid and municipal fumigation trucks to thwart diseases caused by, e.g., the West Nile Virus resembles the mistaken notion that we should lock down and mass inject to eliminate viruses. This annihilative approach is distinctly impractical and harmful. A Bugpocalypse could be more catastrophic for humans than the Covid response.

New York State also contains many windmill turbines. Each year, their giant blades suck in and bludgeon to death hundreds of thousands of migratory birds.

—

In summer, people expose more of their flesh. As they do, one can’t help but notice how many “rock” tattoos. It’s odd that while thirty years ago one almost never saw an inked-up body, nearly half of Millennial and Gen Z Americans are now tattooed. People should be free to get jabbed with needles, or not. You do you.

But the tendency to go along with the crowd largely explains Covid compliance. People freaked out about The Virus because doing so was fashionable. And for those who preferred not to take the Covid shots, there were government mandates.

As I’ve long noticed peers’ influence on behavior, I should have expected the Coronamanic tendency to stampede with the herd. I didn’t foresee this because I consume very little news and thus, failed to see how propagandistic the Scamdemic media was. Additionally, such widespread gullibility and passivity surprised me.

—

On several days, to manage our sun time, Ellen and I went to public libraries or bookstores at midday. Many librarians and bookstore staff still wear masks. When I was growing up, librarians were friendly, matronly, well-adjusted women. Uptalking, nose-pierced, pink-haired individuals have largely replaced them. And that’s just the males.

In the elegant, 1871 St. Johnsbury Athenaeum/library, I skimmed a copy of the most recent Rolling Stone. The author of one article about the pathetic state of the nation breezily recited the trope that Trump’s “pandemic” mismanagement had killed over a million people. Yes, Trump and Congress blew it by deferring to Birx and Fauci and funding the lockdowns. But The Virus didn’t kill anywhere near a million people. For those who believe government stats, most Covid deaths occurred during Biden’s viral reign of terror. Besides, when did Rolling Stone’s editors and readers start caring about old people dying?

When the media still opportunistically sells the mass viral-death myth, why should I stop talking about Coronamania? The relentless, shifting infectious disease hysteria and criticism of RFK and MAHA are efforts to simultaneously attack Trump and promote Pharma products and the mislabeled “expert” class. The problem with MAHA isn’t that it’s challenging the medical and public health orthodoxy, it’s that it’s not doing so comprehensively.

—

One afternoon, we rented a kayak to paddle in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom’s” vast, deep Lake Willoughby, with its 2,000-foot fjord-like cliffs along its east and west sides. I thanked the proprietor for running his business so we could enjoy gliding across the surface of that pretty place. I neglected to ask if he was open in 2020 or 2021. I thought that because recreation was important, he should have been classified as an “essential worker.” If he had been open then, I suspect I would have seen some masked kayakers paddling across this grand expanse. From speaking with Vermonters, I know many swallowed Coronamania hook, line and sinker. Doing so was “progressive.”

—

One night, we slept along the western bank of the 12-mile-wide, 120-mile-long Lake Champlain’s western shore. I awoke at dawn and swam, alone and in an unauthorized area, as the sun rose across the choppy water and over Vermont’s mountains. Fifty yards offshore, I intermittently looked back at the windblown trees adjoining the narrow, deserted beach. It reminded me of Nicaragua’s forested, unguarded Pacific Coast beaches. Such places are slices of Heaven.

That, and other, time in the woods and water on this trip reflected life during the past six and one-third years. I’ve remained angry about the Scamdemic and all the damage it’s caused. But I’ve continually carved out time for fun, tranquility and transgression while millions anxiously, opportunistically or passively complied with nonsense. The best revenge has been living well. Though redemption has been far from complete. And so many, especially the young, lacked my options and will never get the stolen time back.

Three weeks ago, I mentioned some requests to make another batch of the above-pictured shirt.

Since then, I’ve received multiple orders. If you wish to have one or more, please let me know before I order the next batch on Friday. These can be made in men’s and women’s styles and various sizes. The shirts are soft cotton in either black or navy blue. Please specify number, size, type and color.

One shirt costs $19, postpaid to US addresses and $16 for each additional shirt. Given sharply increased postal rates—everything costs way more since the multi-trillion Covid giveaways—I don’t profit from selling these. Please send any inquiry or message regarding orders to forecheck32 at g mail dot com.

I’ve described the pleasing encounters I have when I wear this shirt, which I do whenever I’m in public for a few hours. I never get tired of meeting kindred spirits who resisted the viral lunacy. Other shirt wearers have shared with me their similarly uplifting experiences.

I’ll post again, as usual, on Thursday.

Last week, I read When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm (2022). Fundamentally, its authors, Bogdanich and Forsythe, complain that corporations and US and state and foreign governments hire McKinsey’s 34,000 world-wide employees to analyze their operations and recommend such measures as downsizing (“rightsizing”) workforces and cutting wages. To the authors’ dismay, McKinsey has also made billions promoting, inter alia, the opioid, tobacco and vape and coal industries and advising Enron and Major League Baseball’s cheating Astros, the UK’s National Health Service as it incrementally privatized and corrupt and repressive regimes in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

McKinsey took in $18 billion in 2025. While it’s the most profitable consulting firm, other consultants, such as the Boston Consulting Group, KPMG, EY, Accenture and Deloitte, with, in aggregate, over a million employees, annually bill casinos, hedge funds, Disney, weapons manufacturers, universities, media conglomerates and other clients nearly a trillion dollars.

Consultants’ staffers come disproportionately from MBA and liberal arts programs at high-tuition universities. While the authors express abiding disgust at McKinsey’s facilitation of client evildoing, I suspect the vast majority of McKinsey’s and other firms’ high-income consultants are also NY Times and Washington Post readers and NPR listeners who, when off the clock, bemoan income inequality, oppression, corruption and warmongering, etc. supported by their employer’s recommendations. At least the consultants I know do.

Despite their stated revulsion of corrupt and repressive regimes, most PC consultants and the book’s authors group-thinkingly supported the profoundly corrupt and oppressive Covid lockdowns, closures, mask, test and “vaccine” mandates.

McKinsey and other consultants represent both for-profit corporations, such as Pfizer, and government agencies, such as the FDA, who are supposed to regulate these corporations. The authors observe that McKinsey, and presumably other consultants, perform analyses that seem as if they could be done internally by individuals with decades of corporate or government experience. Though perhaps detached observers see things that members of the audited entity don’t want to admit or lack the detachment to see. Maybe the advisees want to have someone to blame if some insiders resist change or if things worsen following a consultant’s “engagement,” i.e., period of study.

There’s a revolving door between consultancy and high-level government employment. Consultants become government officials. And vice versa. Given this arrangement and the personal connections developed therefrom, consultants who have worked for government agencies have the inside track to lucrative contracts for tasks that government agencies outsource.

Via their recommendations, management consultants can supplant government decision making. Given this blurred line between governments and consultants, “capture” extends beyond the better-known scenario of industry and government linkage and the favoritism that’s manifested when individuals move between, for example, the HHS, FDA, CDC and Pharma.

—

When Congress and Trump and later, Biden, contrived the six-plus-trillion-dollar Covid potlatch/slush fund, they knew a multi-industry feeding frenzy would ensue. Further enriching the rich and connected was a central Scamdemic objective. Politically connected donors and opportunistic consultants were among those who deeply dipped their buckets into the gushing Coronabucks River.

McKinsey got over $100 million from the US government to study and shape the Covid response. Collectively, other large consulting firms got many times that amount from the US, European and Australian governments.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361364956_Pandemic_consulting_How_private_consultants_leverage_public_crisis_management

These consultants received massive government-derived income for: “developing pandemic response command structures”(?), procuring ventilators, acquiring “personal protective equipment,” i.e., blue paper masks, “establishing test-and-trace programs,” distributing “vaccines” and “setting up vaccine-tracking apps,” et al.

The book’s authors observe that management consultants routinely use pretentious jargon, bullet points and alliterative, multi-point plan acronyms to justify their existence. During Coronamania, McKinsey told corporations to “prepare for ‘the next normal,” presumably because saying “the new normal” would, by then, have seemed unoriginal. They also advised clients to be guided by “the five Rs: resolve, resilience, return, reimagination and reform.”

After coming up with the latter theme, they should have taken the rest of the afternoon off.

—

The consultants’ Covid analyses were viral-pork-barrel nonsense. One can’t test and trace a respiratory virus in the same manner as an STD. Compared to normal human interaction, sex entails much closer contact in settings with many fewer people. Moreover, the Covid tests were wildly overinclusive and “asymptomatic spread” was dubious. Viruses are too small and leaky for masks to block them.

Further, ventilators killed many hospital patients. And the Covid shots not only failed to stop infection and spread, some say they’ve killed hundreds of thousands and injured millions. Getting more ventilators and shots was a fool’s errand.

If, population-wide, 99.97% of those who “got Covid” survived, those whose deaths were attributed to it must either have been exceptionally frail and/or were killed by hospital mistreatment. About 8% of ostensible Covid victims died at home, compared to 31% of pre-Scamdemic all-cause, at-home deaths. Hospitals were never more dangerous places than during Coronamania.

Given the Covid “mitigation” measures’ farcicality, the hundreds of billions of public dollars spent on Covid mitigation consulting fees were effectively thrown away. Instead of imposing the Covid interventions’ extreme social and economic costs, Western nations’ citizenry would have been far better off if their governments and media had treated the virus like any other flu season, minus the shots, which don’t work in either instance. Doing nothing would have been far better than pretending The Virus was indiscriminately killing healthy people. It clearly wasn’t.

—

According to Bogdanich and Forsythe:

McKinsey closed out the last year of Trump’s first term “capitalizing on a dire health-care emergency—the coronavirus pandemic that as of March 2022 had killed more than 900,000 Americans. With the country convulsing from the pandemic, McKinsey sought to stay in the spotlight by relentlessly churning out Covid-19 position papers, focusing less on how people could protect themselves and more on how companies could use lessons from the pandemic to improve their competitive standing. ‘From surviving to thriving’ read the McKinsey missive.

Firstly, the 900,000 figure is preposterous. Nearly all said to have died “from The Virus” were already very old and/or in poor health. Hospitals accelerated these deaths via ventilation, sedation, kidney-impairing medication and dehydration. Additionally, Coronamanic isolation caused deaths of despair and overdoses. And the CARES Act lavishly subsidized hospitals to misattribute to Covid deaths from other causes. Any audit should have emphasized all of the foregoing and tailored its recommendations accordingly. But consultants like to please those who hire them and don’t want to scare away business.

Within months of the Scamdemic’s onset, McKinsey had also advised local and state (Washington, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey) officials. To the extent that one believes any of the official Covid data, these states had higher death tolls than states that didn’t hire consultants and locked down and closed schools for much shorter periods.

Moreover, the book’s authors seem not to know that Sweden and African nations that didn’t lock down and close schools had fewer ostensible Covid deaths and fewer excess, all-cause deaths than the US did between 2020-25.

Before any Covid “mitigation” began, The Novel Virus’s clearly identifiable and limited risk profile was already known from February 2020 Italian and Spanish data. The US and other governments deliberately ignored this fundamental fact because Coronamania gave them an excuse to restructure society and the economy. Instead of legitimizing the Scamdemic by tweaking the society-wide response, consultants with integrity would have highlighted the clear age-stratification of ostensible Covid deaths and Covid response’s social and economic costs. But when governments don’t want to find something, they don’t ask their consultants to look for it. And the consultants know how to turn a blind eye to the obvious. By doing so regarding Covid’s plainly stratified risk profile, management consultants were Scamdemic enablers.

The extreme, society-wide Scamdemic response lacked factual justification. In general, pandemic planning is a massive scam. In the modern era, pandemics don’t kill large numbers of humans. Nearly all humans have functioning immune systems and adequate food, plus antibiotics and steroids to treat secondary infections.

—

The book’s authors emphasize that McKinsey and presumably other consultants have a presence at the table inside the world’s most consequential companies and governments. They quote an anonymous former McKinsey consultant who sarcastically wrote:

To those convinced a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are Illuminati, Lizard People, or “globalists.” They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history, There is, however, McKinsey & Company.

As the Scamdemic showed more clearly and consequentially than ever, there are immense conspiracies. The big consultants facilitate these. When interests converge, a formal conspiracy isn’t needed. Common goals promote common reaction and strategic acquiescence by many institutions and individuals. Some of that coordination is direct, though hidden. Other widely shared behaviors are spontaneously driven by government or market incentives. When they co-opt potential dissenters, it’s easier for conspiracists to achieve their objectives.

—

If there hadn’t been a Coronavirus conspiracy, governments would not have senselessly locked down their people for the first time ever, nor closed schools and colleges when only the old were at any risk. The Congress would not, when it passed the CARES Act in March, 2020, have allocated two-trillion dollars to fund a two-week “curve-flattening” period. Nor would the US government have later spent, on Covid, four additional trillion dollars and printed an additional six trillion and funneled it through banks, causing major, intractable inflation and by far, the biggest upward transfer of wealth in history.

Nor would straight-dealing governments have required billions of people at no risk of viral death to inject an experimental substance and told them it was “safe” and would “stop infection and spread,” when neither long-term safety nor infection protection study had been studied. They wouldn’t have required asymptomatic testing via an overinclusive method never intended for diagnosis of a respiratory virus with unspecific symptoms. Nor would devious, self-aggrandizing individuals from the Gates Foundation, the NIH, the WHO, and the UK’s Wellcome Trust have begun meeting in 2016 to prepare a pandemic response to an imagined disease outbreak or, in October 2019, conducted a Scamdemic simulation known as Event 201. Nor would the media in Coronamanically-aligned nations have simultaneously displayed and recited such vapid, execrable slogans as “Follow The Science.” and “We’re all in this together.”

If the Covid response hadn’t been a conspiracy, the media, academicians and consultants would have asked obvious questions and presented dissenting viewpoints regarding the obvious inconsistencies in the Covid narrative. Non-conspiratorial governments and social media sites would have allowed public dialogue instead of censoring dissent and banning assembly, except for anti-police demonstrations. Non-conspiratorial government officials wouldn’t have given away hundreds of billions to cronies in management consultants and other industries.

Like pigs at a trough, the massive Covid giveaways fattened hospital systems, hedge funds, digital companies, management consultants and other de facto conspiracists. In return for the hundreds of millions they made, these entities acted as if The Virus was cataclysmic, focused on logistical dimensions of a Covid response that were completely beside the point and disregarded the costs of the Covid theater. Trying to prove the US or some other nation didn’t lock down soon enough, didn’t have enough masks or test kits or teams or didn’t get enough “shots in arms” was all tripe. The Virus simply didn’t endanger healthy people.

In the meanwhile, the non-wealthy in many nations were subjected to extreme restrictions and permanently became much poorer as the government funneled billions to connected consulting firms and relentlessly told a series of grand lies to advance the Scamdemic. Those who saw the Scam from the beginning were badly outresourced. They lacked the media access to counter the formidable, Covid-demagoguing constituency that made fortunes and political gains by promoting, lying about and going along with the viral chicanery.

I very seldom watch movies, much less travel to do so. But last week, I van-pooled 32 miles each way with six other vaxx opponents to see a one-night showing of the Children’s Health Defense-funded documentary, Duty to Disobey, on a big screen at a multiplex theater with those oversized, excessively-padded seats.

The ride itself was pleasing. I enjoy sharing time with people who saw the Covid Scam. As a fellow Medical Freedom Rider lamented en route to the theater, it’s been hard during Coronamania to live among so many stupid people.

This wasn’t a gratuitous swipe. On the few occasions when lockdown, mask and shot backers were willing to discuss the Covid response with me, it’s been painful to hear the plainly false and illogical things they said with assurance. Most still have no idea of the Scamdemic’s foundational lies or its thinly veiled social, economic and political agendas. Most naively believe that The Virus killed over a million Americans and that the experts saved us or at least “did the best they could, given what they knew at the time.”

Ugh.

Aside from providing moral support, everyone in the van offered some interesting factual tidbit or book or Substack recommendation.

—

Relying heavily on interview excerpts, the film chronicled how the US military mistreated its own soldiers, sailors, pilots and other personnel by requiring them to take the unsafe and ineffective Covid shots and logistically, physically and verbally abusing and/or discharging those who resisted.

The military members’ personal accounts were troubling and earnestly expressed. Those in the military are routinely sent across the country or globe, often separated from family, for extended periods and/or were subject to being sent into combat or other danger. It’s deeply ironic that the government took away the basic bodily autonomy of the men and women who ostensibly protect our freedom.

Though it’s often been unclear how American transoceanic military excursions over the past century-plus have protected American freedom.

Moreover, as in the photo above, seeing a twenty-something camo-clad guy with an automatic weapon afraid of getting a virus that didn’t kill remotely healthy people under 80 doesn’t make the military look like it’s full of fearless warriors. But because the military brass wanted above all else to spread the Covid terror, they theatrically required everyone to mask, even outdoors. Oh, the viral peril!

The Department of Defense’s Biodefense apparatus was at the core of the darkly strategic Covid overreaction, including the “miraculous” shots and the mandates. The Scamdemic was a war against the American people. Working in conjunction with the public health bureaucracy, DOD stole innumerable experiences, life savings, freedom of expression and in-person elections from Americans. They divided and conquered.

—

Near its beginning, the movie showed military inductees lining up with both deltoids exposed and receiving, assembly-line fashion, dozens of shots for diseases that they already had and/or that simply didn’t threaten them. Though I’m not afraid of needles, the physically invasive spectacle was creepy, even more so than seeing military staff swallow mouthfuls of pills would have been.

This revulsion was heightened because injectees had volunteered to deal with the aforementioned array of hardships that being in the military entails. Some interviewees reported vaxx injuries, including strokes, cancer, flu, nerve damage, high blood pressure, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Medical personnel and troops also said health data were misrepresented and that their concerns were dismissed.

Beyond the objectionable visceral dimension, the narrators noted that military codes require soldiers to follow lawful orders. Yet, soldiers can and should disobey unlawful orders. When they were mandated, the Covid shots had received only Emergency Use Authorization, rather than full approval. Thus, any order to take these shots was invalid and military personnel weren’t legally obligated to take them. Hence the title.

—

Several of the interviewed soldiers stated that they joined the military because they could retire after twenty years with pensions, medical insurance and other benefits. Given the fear of losing this excellent compensation package, many succumbed to the Covid vaxx mandate.

In the movie, War Secretary Hegseth pronounced that after all of the vaxx mandate abuse during Biden’s term, the discharged vaxx-declining soldiers would be reinstated with back pay.

Predictably, many other private and public sector employees who rejected the shots were eventually, similarly vindicated, reinstated and compensated. Those with life experience who caved to vaxx pressure should have foreseen that they would prevail if they stood their ground. Though it’s hard to accept such risk when an employer threatens an employee’s livelihood and that of his/her family and one doesn’t have some savings to tide them through a jobless period.

Soldiers and non-military workforce members should have recognized their own bargaining power. Once someone has shown their reliability and developed knowledge and skills, they become hard to replace. Most organizations are severely disrupted by the loss of even a productive ten percent of their staff. Thus, in the workplace, even a distinct minority wields considerable power. Military recruiting levels have been declining for years. Mistreating personnel only lessened enlistments.

Be that as it may, I’ve heard that the military is jerking around some of the non-injectors regarding reinstatement terms and conditions. As is often true in legal matters, the devil can be in the details. And even if a resister obtained a favorable resolution, the process of obtaining that outcome can entail much punishment.

—

Some vaxx opponents have suggested that the shots were a backdoor way to impose an “ideological purity” test, i.e., that military commanders and politicians wanted to purge questioning, “conservative” vaxx resisters. The shot mandates clearly weren’t driven by concerns for soldiers’ physical well-being. The vast majority of military personnel are under 30 and nearly all are under 50. Those in that age range faced functionally no risk of virally induced death.

Additionally, the military’s general ongoing jabfest gives Pharma a guaranteed annual market of exposed upper arms. One-hundred and fifty thousand enlist every year.

Others say the million-person military’s vaxx coercion campaign served as trial/model for society-wide compulsion of the other 339 million. And for broader global social, economic and environmental control, extending to intensified electronic surveillance, social credit systems and digital currencies, with, e.g., the attendant ability to debank those who might oppose governments, either national or global.

—

Initially, seeing the movie on the big screen legitimized its message and gave me a sugar-high of optimism. I thought, “As more people watch movies like this, they’ll see that the government lied and the shots were phony and therefore, the rest of the Covid response was equally dishonest.”

That would be a cinematic happy ending, even if it would come far too late.

But as I thought about it the next morning, I like the rapper, Fatlip, couldn't believe how naive I had gotten. Despite aggregating viewers from a fifty-mile radius in densely populated New Jersey, only about forty people attended the regional, one-time showing.

At this stage, most people don’t know or even care what happened during Coronamania. Instead, this week, the media and the masses focused on Taylor Swift’s wedding, World Cup soccer and, for Pete’s sake, Graham Platner. Next week the media will actively distract the public with a fresh set of ephemeral, low-impact topics or celebrity deaths deemed more important than “outdated” Covid. John and Jane Doe will go the TenPlex to watch some bizarre suspense film, some crime movie full of car chases and explosions, some unfunny comedy, some corny love story, some PC propaganda movie or Toy Story 5. But a true-life Coronamania retrospective? Bah!

—

Nonetheless, for the few who saw it, the film was a worthy reminder/example of how darkly extensive the Covid response was.

You’ll have to seek out this documentary. PBS will never show it and it won’t make a wider, encore theater run. CHD is selling a DVD. There’s talk of a streamed version being made available on YouTube.

Three weeks ago, while thrift store shopping for lightly used t-shirts, I came across one with the genial message “FUCK YOUR VACCINE PASSPORT.”

I took it off the rack and added it to the reusable shopping bag containing two comfortable cotton shirts I had already selected. But then I wondered: has the Scamdemic gone on so long that the original owner wore this shirt a few times and then decided that, as with the shirts displaying The Backstreet Boys or some local town’s 5K Fun Run logos that glut the thrift store racks, it wasn’t relevant anymore?

That would reflect misjudgment. I see Covid overreaction-induced damage most days and expect this to persist. Wearing this shirt will remind others why the society and economy are so deeply dysfunctional and why those who injected now have health challenges. I warned people, in March 2020, of lockdowns, closures and the multi-trillion-dollar giveaway’s effects. They told me I was no doctor/virologist.

When I made my final shopping selections, I put the FYVP shirt back on the rack for two reasons. Firstly, its message departs from my rhetorical style. Though I would greet warmly anyone wearing or speaking those words.

Secondly, I figured I wouldn’t wear that shirt much because I like the above-pictured shirt that I “designed” better. The lockdowns, closures, irrational fear and Covid crony potlatch caused me and billions of others irreparable harm. The message on my shirt includes the shot but encompasses the broader range of damage and the profoundly ridiculous viral fear to which most people succumbed.

I sometimes mention the pleasing encounters I have when I wear this shirt, which I do whenever I’m among more than a hundred people. I never get tired of finding kindred spirits. Other shirt wearers have told me they’ve had similar experiences.

Many passersby frown at my shirt. That’s pleasing in its own way. I’ve never wanted everyone to like me. You can tell much about a person by knowing who dislikes them. No frowners stop to discuss my message. Your results may vary. Though I doubt it.

Several readers recently asked if I have any shirts left. I don’t, except for the three I’m keeping. I need a clean one to be buried in.

I’ve found a shirt maker who will print a supplemental order. If you wish to have one or more, please let me know this week before I have this batch printed. I can have these made in men’s (and women’s) styles and various sizes. The shirts are soft cotton and can be made in black or navy blue in either men’s or women’s style. One shirt costs $19, postpaid, and $16 for each additional shirt. Given high postal rates, I don’t make profit from selling these.

I’ll post again, as usual, on Thursday. Something like 290 weeks in a row.

While I don’t watch basketball on TV, once or twice each winter I attend a high school game. Though they’re smaller than the guys on TV, high school players can be very skilled. I was reminded of this when I played with some yesterday. As they play fewer minutes and have no commercial breaks, these games are much shorter than those on TV.

Almost twenty years ago, I went to see a good, local team, St. Mary’s, play a home game against St. Anthony, then the number one team in the State and some years, in the US. Two years prior, I had played in a pickup game against St. Mary’s big scorer, who lived in my town. He was about 6’4” and kind of gangly at that time. I wanted to see how much he had grown and improved and how his team would do against strong competition.

Being inside a high school, with its hallways and lockers reminds me of that life stage, mostly in a good way. While Taylor Swift and millions of others may have hated being a teen, I liked it. The social life in high school was better overall than in any other period of my life. While there were some cliques and antipathy and aggression, I had daily contact with hundreds of truly funny and/or warm people. I discovered that many girls saw the world differently and had a kindness that many boys lacked. I even learned some stuff in classes.

Most relevant here, I remembered from direct experience how some teenage boys’ self-esteem is tied to how they perform in sports.

Because St. Mary’s was in an urban setting and it took me a while to find parking, I was a few minutes late. By then, the seats in the old, dark gym were all taken with St. Mary families and fans hoping to see their hometown boys make a good showing against North Jersey’s St. Anthony juggernaut.

Thus, after buying my ticket, I had to stand along the baseline underneath the basket nearest to the door. The baseline was only about six feet from the gym wall. I glanced at the bright yellow and red bulbs of the old scoreboard at the gym’s far end. Four minutes into the game, St. Anthony led 16–4. Uh oh.

It got worse. St. Anthony pressured like no other team. They simultaneously played three super-fast, Division I-bound guards, adept at trapping, especially because they bumped and grabbed at every turn. Due to their mystique and a chronically complaining coach, the refs cut St. Anthony excessive slack. The rich get richer. Backing the three guards, St. Anthony had two rangy Division I forwards ready to intercept any panicked pass.

St. Mary’s players must have hoped to at least compete with St. Anthony. But despite their good record before that game and having competent athletes, St. Mary’s couldn’t make or find enough space on the floor to get the ball into the front court. St. Anthony got steal after steal and dunk after dunk. Instead of cheering their home team, St. Mary’s family and friends sat in stunned silence.

There’s a limit on how many timeouts a team can call. I suspect that St. Mary’s used one or two before I arrived. Without these, they couldn’t slow the frantic pace that St. Anthony was imposing. St. Mary’s had no choice but to try to play through a meltdown. They were in a bad situation.

Just then, as a St. Mary’s player tried to pass the ball inbound, St. Anthony knocked it into the crowd standing with me along the baseline. Someone caught it and flipped it to the ref, 5’7,” in his late fifties, built like a fire hydrant, his broad face framed by a buzz-cut, partial head of white hair. He looked like a former drill sergeant who had officiated many hundreds of games.

The ref held briefly the ball as he ordered the baseline-standing spectators to shift just enough to the side so that the St. Mary’s player would have room to inbound it against the press.

At very close range, I could see that the player wore an expression of profound dread that one sees only during extreme crises, as on refugees or soldiers entering battle. Here this teen was, his self-esteem under heavy attack as his team was getting run off the floor in front of nearly everyone who knew him. His nominally Catholic brethren from St. Anthony were showing no mercy.

As soon as elbow room was temporarily created, the ref moved directly to the St. Mary’s player’s side and paused. Facing up the floor without making eye contact with the player and through a ventriloquist’s tight lips, without a hint of irony, the ref said crisply and just loudly enough for the player, me and a few other standees to hear:

“Don’t forget to have fun.”

He abruptly handed the ball to the player and St. Mary’s quest for the frontcourt continued.

The ref was The Adult in the Room. The Voice of Reason. The Keeper of Real. The Provider of Tough Love. The Right Guy in the Right Place at the Right Time.

Brusquely and implicitly, he was saying something very important in that small space to that desperate, disgraced kid: you’re young, vital, well-fed, well-sheltered and well-educated in a world where many aren’t. You’re doing something you say you love. And you’re pretty good at it, even if that’s not immediately obvious. Fight on, but with perspective.

—

Seeing and hearing that moment was more memorable than anything I’ve seen watching a college or professional game. The ref’s command was simple but deeply, broadly meaningful. Most of us get distracted or caught up in moments, lose sight of centrally important stuff we know and need reminders of our blessings.

By coincidence, later that year, on the birthday of an older work colleague named Sindy, I asked her to give me some advice derived from her life experience. She told me, “Mark, every day I do something I enjoy, even if it’s just for five minutes.”

I thought that was a very good principle and I told her so. It’s good that Sindy lived by it. A year or two later, she learned she had cancer and died within a few months.

—

Our culture oversells the idea that life should be fun. Life inevitably presents challenges. And even when things aren’t especially hard, most people have plenty of responsibilities, the fulfillment of which is simply not fun.

But when one is doing something that’s supposed to be fun—something that we tell ourselves we like, something we make time for, something that we self-identify by—one must remain mindful of how fortunate we are to do any of this stuff. Even when not every moment of doing a given thing is fun and we question why we’re doing it, we need to be our own emotional drill sergeant/high school ref, reminding ourselves not to forget to see the beauty in the activities and people we say we love.

Though sometimes it helps when others remind us.

—

Every day during the past six years, I’ve been angry at my government for pulling a massive Scam. I’ve also been angry at people I knew who went along and, without regret, have given up those relationships. There’s been too much foolishness and hostility to forget. And I saw too much permanent harm done to people I knew. Lives of those in their twenties were derailed when those lives should be at their peaks. The damage persists.

My life hasn’t ever been solely about chasing fun. And I try not to have fun at others’ expense. But decisions about the amount of fun one seeks and the ways they do so are personal. Governments had no business taking away billions of peoples’ favorite recreational options. None of the stuff I normally do to have fun would have hurt other people if I did these things during the Scamdemic.

While every day of The Scamdemic has angered me, most days I tried to do something I liked in order to offset the anger. It never completely worked, not did the effect last that long. But such distractions have kept me alive.

—

Many readers have asked me how long it takes to write each post. I don’t keep track. Attorneys have to record their work time in six-minute increments. I’m pleased that I’m not required to do this anymore. If I confronted a clock, learning the amount of time each post takes would bother me. Including thinking of a theme, doing research, writing a draft and all the edits, it must take at least ten hours.

Some readers have suggested to me that they like my opening stories more than they like my interpretation of these. Those people should be pleased that this week, instead of writing something more comprehensive, I’ll be jumping off a dock into a lake somewhere.

No one needed to tell me to do this.

While over the nearly seven decades of my life, I’ve witnessed some negative changes in American culture, fireworks shows are one of things that have improved. There are far more, more colorful and more elaborate displays these days, i.e., nights.

On 1960s-80s Fourths of July, my hometown, Oakland NJ, presented a modest display. They’d launch roughly one shell per minute, giving viewers time to ponder, rate and Rorschach what they had just witnessed. If fireworks can be Zen, these were.

These small-town shows later str uck me as a metaphor for healthy eating and living, generally. Enjoy each bite. Don’t be in a hurry to finish. The low-key approach was likely driven by budgetary constraints and not meant to convey a broader message.

In mid-1960s Paterson, NJ, where my family lived before the city declined sharply, Mom and Dad took me and my siblings to that city’s Hinchcliffe Stadium fireworks. As years passed, we watched displays a few towns away, where an elegant suburb, Ridgewood, put on a good show. Separated by five miles, Paterson and Ridgewood could scarcely have been more different. But if you visit after it rains, Paterson’s Great Falls are thunderous and spectacular, especially viewed from the bridge over the winding river just above the falls, nearer to the stadium, which has been renovated after having been vandalized nearly into oblivion.

I’ve watched, in-person, some of the America’s grandest fireworks displays. I’ve seen several New York City mega-shows and one in Washington, DC. Wolfeboro, New Hampshire’s abundant, gaudy pyrotechnics a few hundred feet above a large flotilla of pleasure craft reflected picturesquely off the surface of Lake Winnipesaukee. So did those we saw last year in Burlington, Vermont along Lake Champlain.

I’ve also seen some amusing, spontaneous, DIY exhibitions. While sitting in the dark on my aunt and uncle’s front porch in my ancestral hometown, Shamokin, PA, we heard a few seemingly drunk teen or early-twenties males vertically shoot a single bottle rocket about every three minutes from the nearby, massive waste coal bank that looms above the town’s north side. After each blast, the rockets’ launchers chanted “USA! USA! USA!” until, after a half dozen, they had none left. Post-industrial Shamokin is a no-frills place.

Biloxi, Mississippi put on a solid display above the Gulf of Mexico. Far more exciting than the official show was the forty-five minute, impromptu warm-up act. Unauthorized, locals unleashed a relentless and at times, scary onslaught of cherry bombs and M-80s exploding at close range at short intervals. Countless bottle rockets whistled sideways just above the thick crowd’s heads. Given the throng gathered and the multitude of blasts, it seemed likely that some bystander would be struck, exclaim “I’m hit!” and wail in pain. Or worse. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, at least not near where we stood, in the summer we were there.

Pound-for-pound, a 1999 post-game Detroit Tiger Stadium fireworks were the most memorable I’ve seen. Well after 10 PM—it’s light late in Michigan in early July—a small truck towed a 10 x 15-foot platform to the middle of the field. From our upper deck seats along the right-field line, I told my son, with whom I had ridden the overnight Greyhound Bus from Newark, NJ, that this show would be over in five minutes.

I was wrong. A relentless, half-hour barrage ensued. It was pre-Iraq Shock and Awe. Rockets’ red, white, blue, green, orange and yellow glare intermittently shone on the faces of the forty-thousand spectators we could see sitting across the boxed-in stadium. The stadium’s configuration also trapped and yielded deafening echoes. Even the jaded late teens near us howled, without a hint of irony, at the show’s intensity. It astounded me that such a seemingly small launch pad could deliver so much firepower. When the finale ended, the cart caught on fire. The grounds crew needed two thick hoses to extinguish it. Disco inferno!

And flying east/home on a commercial jet one Fourth of July night, we serially passed over and saw, but didn’t hear, multiple shows while looking out the plane’s left side window. It was other-worldly. I suspected that the pilots saw displays on both sides.

No matter their politics, most Americans enjoy an annual shot of fireworks. But once yearly is enough. No boosters are required.

—

Instead of honest, limited governance, American politicians distract and manipulate its citizenry with various forms of theater. It employs flowery, grandiose, or sometimes inflammatory rhetoric and displays visual emblems of American identity. As are US flags, parades, the national anthem and other nationalistic songs, movies that glorify World War II soldiers and jingoistic Olympic medal counts, fireworks are a form of governmental Circus. While most just like the way fireworks look, others see and hear these as symbols of military might and national unity. As does other patriotic iconography, the rockets’ multi-colored streams and booms make Americans feel proud and protected.

Remember when some huckster staged that corny “Hands Across America,” during which five million people held hands in a sinuous line across the continental US? This episode foreshadowed how inane and hype-event-loving Americans could be. Both then and during Coronamania, the notion that “We’re all in this together” drove irrational, theatrical behavior by those lacking meaningful work and/or sufficient real-world connections to other people.

Given their subsequent Covid germophobia, one might wonder why the 1986 hand-holders didn’t fear that ten minutes of unmasked, ungloved and un-hand-sanitized contact might spread a Deadly Virus from coast to coast. Imagine all those shared microbes quickly leaping from person-to-person!

—

In Election Year 2020, 80% of municipal governments cancelled fireworks. This was a way for Democrats who ran US cities to remind Americans how afraid they were supposed to feel and how desperate they should be to vote for a plainly senile presidential candidate who would magically return us to “normalcy.” I loathed that phony, paternalistic word, the strategic coercion it entailed and its chief exponent, Biden. I also hated Trump for signing the CARES Act and bankrolling the Scamdemic in the first place. One does not simply put a nation in a coma, for any reason, much less over a respiratory virus that didn’t kill remotely healthy people under 80. This was known in early March 2020 to anyone who was paying attention.

Withholding 2020 fireworks theater was itself Covid theater. Even at that time, Walmarts were open and public transit operated. Yet somehow, being outside among other people watching bombs bursting in air was, like playing basketball in the park, terroristically portrayed as a mass casualty event in the making. Cancelling fireworks should have been another clear sign that the virus was badly overblown and the “mitigation” was bogus.

—

Three weeks ago, I took a bus to Washington, DC to visit some people. I saw much of the mall fenced off to prepare that space, including the then-intact Reflecting Pool, for America’s 250th Fourth of July extravaganza. Given memories of the recent Scamdemic, the prospect of this “Yay, America!” festival didn’t excite me.

As on prior trips, when I visited the museums, walked between the monuments or rode the Metro, I wore my “I SURVIVED CORONAMANIA: UNMASKED, UNINJECTED, UNAFRAID” t-shirt. Most DC residents and tourists still seem to think the Covid response was appropriate. Many scrunched their faces at my message, though none stopped to discuss it.

Even at that late date, I saw many inveterate mask wearers as well as some “BELIEVE SCIENCE” stickers fastened to sidewalk signage. DC-area people comprise a bizarre, groupthinking, controlling cult, incapable of calm, rational discourse. They firmly believe government intervention and spending can solve all problems, including problems that aren’t really problems.

On the plus side, a distinct DC minority told me they liked or loved my message and dapped me. Either reaction, pro or con, was pleasing. I prefer to meet people who saw the Scam. It’s good to know that not everyone is simple-minded or cynically opportunistic. But I didn’t mind antagonizing those who supported the viral nonsense. They deserve continuing reminders of how consequentially wrong they were.

—

I used to think federal, state and local governments were patronage-ridden, overfunded and overrated but ultimately did more good than bad. During the Scamdemic, I stopped thinking so charitably and naively.

The Covid response manifested that the US is ruled by captured, corrupt, lying bureaucrats, politicians, PR firm lobbyists and multi-state and trans-national corporations and entities, including allied legacy media and social media platforms. This surreptitious, conspiratorial junta extensively censored counter-Coronamania-narrative-speaking citizens on a mass scale and defied the federal and state constitutions they had publicly sworn to uphold.

As a reader recently commented, “Covid-era insanity exposed international criminal collusion between almost every national government to scare and impose Orwellian control over their populations via a fake pandemic promoted by a complicit media.”

Less is often more. From 2020-present, the nation would have been infinitely better off if there had been no NIH, CDC, NIAID, FDA, CIA, DARPA or WHO to stoke unwarranted fear and promote absurd and destructive lockdown theater and counterproductive “vaccines.”

While America remains comparatively prosperous, its Covid potlatch, foreign wars and entitlement spending have caused inflation that has wiped out trillions of American households’ savings. Fully-employed people in their late thirties can’t afford houses. Social Security is predicted to go broke in six years. While we spend 20% of GDP on medical care, life spans have flattened. Nonetheless, in addition to shifting trillions to the rich via Covid giveaways, the US still invades distant countries to change regimes and ostensibly to confiscate heavily hyped, but unfound, weapons of mass destruction.

—

In addition to making me hate the government, The Scamdemic has sharply, permanently lowered my esteem for most individual Americans. The sample whom I knew or heard weigh in on the Covid response manifested how badly informed, gullible, passive or opportunistic most of the public was/is.

During Coronamania, most Americans joined a fearful, angry mob and verbally attacked those who refused to go along. Two decades ago, many of these pro-lockdowners/maskers/vaxxers had chanted, “We are the 99%!”

Therefore, I no longer feel solidarity with most Americans. We who rejected the lockdowns and pressure to take the Covid shots must concede that we are only part of the roughly 19%, i.e., the percentage that never injected.

No masker or vaxxer could explain why, if their masks and shots protected them, they needed me to mimic their behavior. Worse, almost no one will apologize for supporting the lockdowns, closures, tests, masks, multi-trillion-dollar giveaways and shots. Instead, showing deep deficits of character, they pretend these never happened.

—

This multiple-of-fifty Fourth of July, what does it mean to be, or be a free citizen of, a sovereign nation?

During the Scamdemic, tens of millions immigrated, unjabbed, to the US. The immunological double-standard during 2021-24’s mass influx should have signaled those who hadn’t already seen it that the government didn’t really believe The Deadly Virus was deadly or that the shots stopped infection and spread.

America’s borders have been porous for decades, creating a cultural polyglot. Official stats say that over 15% of those who live in the US weren’t born here. Where I live, the number is at least twice as high.

While some immigration benefits the nation, as in every aspect of life, there can be too much of a good thing. Assembling an ethnically, racially, religiously, linguistically and culturally diverse mix of people with, for example, different levels of noise tolerance, from various other regions into a nation has, for centuries, been problematic all over the globe.

Many have immigrated to the US to get free stuff or to work for sub-market wages. If our deeply indebted nation must heavily subsidize immigrants and many immigrants and natives can’t find jobs, perhaps we’ve exceeded functional immigration levels.

In an increasingly globalized world, America doesn’t control its own destiny. Its economy, government and media are heavily indebted to and influenced by foreign governments and international corporations. Multilateral entities: the UN, WHO, WEF, WTO, NATO, The World Bank, et al., seek to dictate a wide range of American policies including, e.g., quarantines and vaccination.

—

America still has much to commend it. It’s endowed with much natural beauty, fuel and minerals and abundant arable land and water, at least outside the Southwest, though much land and water is foreign-owned. The US has also built vast networks of infrastructure, wealth and a wide safety net that, perhaps unsustainably, provides far more than basic necessities for tens of millions.

It’s the only country in which most of us have lived. I know many people here and still like some of them. While I enjoy traveling to other countries, I and most others raised in the US are so thoroughly, culturally American that living abroad would disorient us. Besides, unlike the US, other countries deport Americans who overstay their visits and visas.

Moreover, other countries are plainly worse in multiple, important ways. Their tribal rivalries and violence are far more intense than ours. And other nations,’ e.g., Canada’s, Ireland’s, the UK’s, Australia’s and New Zealand’s, governments and citizens went even more Corona crazy than the US did.

For all the above reasons, mass emigration isn’t a serious option.

While recognizing that one’s country is less bad than other nations justifies some measure of gratefulness, it doesn’t inspire celebration.

—

When Americans watch fireworks from lawn chairs or car hoods, we’re commemorating revolutionaries who violently opposed governmental overreach. Instead of vigorously opposing Coronamanic oppression, most Americans did whatever the government told them, no matter how ridiculous. The fearful also demanded that others mindlessly obey.

A few years ago, during nearby Piscataway, NJ’s perennially pleasing fireworks, one exploding shell transformed into a rudimentary, albeit evanescent, smiley face. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then I LOL’d, both at the goofy retro cultural allusion and the capability of crudely pulling it off. Oh, those computers!

This year, why not unveil a spherical firework that looks like The Deadly Virus? Some viewers might scream, reach for their masks and run for cover. Most won’t realize their government was mocking them, ex post facto, for their naive Coronamania compliance.

The past six-plus years have shown that, no matter how many flags Americans wave, slogans they repeat, Olympic medals Team America wins, or how many fireworks we display, this isn’t the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. America’s delusional national identity is based on massive hype, not substance.

Last week, I received this e-mail:

The following paragraph from your recent Dispatch made me do more research into statins and their possible relationship to anxiety and depression in an individual:

“Moreover, older men hormonally lose their resolve and risk tolerance and become more anxious. The meds, especially the statins, they swallow may exacerbate this emotional frailty. Watching tons of news doesn’t help.”

I cannot find a lot on this but I found an interesting bit on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskDocs/comments/1meyajw/my_husband_changed_completely_on_a_statin/?solution=996a7daf2788064e996a7daf2788064e&js_challenge=1&token=7afd7253fec22262ff1c52b1703fe9ec80be9a933a8fedcde3164cb869054746&jsc_orig_r=

I did find a little more but nothing backed up by any definitive studies.

Are there any books, articles, or experiences with people that you had that made you connect the loss of resolve and anxiousness to statins?"

—

I responded:

I saw one study that discussed statins and declines in androgens. I don’t recall where.

I’m mostly relying, as I did during the Scamdemic, on basic biology and observations of people I know. Statin users I’ve known talk about feeling weaker and mentally scattered. I’ve seen listlessness, confusion and/or worry in those I know who take these.

—

I take an intuitive, holistic view of biology, ecology and human health. Changing one thing in these realms typically triggers other changes, often for the worse.

Cholesterol is essential. It’s the foundation for all steroid hormones, including those that regulate blood sugar, metabolism and electrolyte balance. Brains need cholesterol to function. When serum cholesterol drops, cognitive function worsens. Lowering cholesterol also weakens immunity because cholesterol is a Vitamin D precursor. If statins down-regulate cholesterol, don’t they also lower other hormone levels, including those that enable a wide range of physiological and cognitive functions and influence mood?

—

Most Americans see medical interventions as unalloyed goods. “Health care,” which most conflate with medical treatment, regularly ranks high on lists of voters’ concerns. Instead of behaving more responsibly, people take medications to solve perceived problems. This primary reliance on pills and shots reveals peoples’ disbelief that they’re intrinsically vital. It also shows that they see the world as dangerous and that medical treatments shield them from these dangers and even normal aging.

Most people perceive medication, generally, as a sophisticated form of chicken soup: they thought taking these precautions couldn’t hurt. They saw lockdowns, school closures, distancing, masks and asymptomatic tests the same way. It turned out that these interventions lasted much longer than two weeks. These also caused broad, deep, lasting harm, as have the vaunted “vaccines.”

Simultaneously but oddly, from 2020-24, the government and media forcefully attempted to convince the public that self-care: exercise, sunlight exposure and taking vitamins, zinc, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were dangerous and ineffective against Covid. Many self-deputized public health experts histrionically parroted officials’ mockery of these safe and salutary measures. The media tried to marginalize these low-cost interventions to protect their Med/Pharma advertisers’ profits.

—

As was selling the Covid shots, selling statins is lucrative. Many believe “the research” concluding that statins extend lives. But I learned by reading environmental experts’ reports produced for environmental litigation that if you pay experts enough money, they’ll shape their analyses to yield their clients’ desired conclusion. The models and studies cited to justify Coronamania and the “vaccines” likely reflected such dollar-driven biases. For their part, Covid vaxxers not only showed blind faith in the Covid shots, they vilified those who refused to inject.

Nearly 25% of American males over 40 take a statin. That percentage increases as patients reach ensuing decades. Based on a blood test, a doctor has recommended that I join that cohort. I won’t do so. As were Covid tests, cholesterol tests are highly overinclusive. Both tests are intended to scare people and thus, compel them to consume Pharma products.

I prefer not to live listlessly and experience muscle pain or weakness, liver damage, diabetes, memory loss, etc., as do many statinistas. Low-tech metrics: my weight, blood pressure, pulse and ability to play basketball for an hour without wheezing suggest that I won’t suffer a heart attack anytime soon. Moreover, the doctors I read have been saying for decades that high triglycerides and C-reactive-protein readings correlate far more closely with cardiovascular incidents than do cholesterol numbers. Besides, I’m unmotivated to live to an age where I can’t walk, see or remember my wife’s and kids’ names.

Similarly, the Covid shots offered no benefit, only downside risk. Nonetheless, hundreds of millions embraced these, posted their jab photos or vaxx cards and even broke into post-injection tears of joy. How pathetic and delusional. Despite public health officials’, politicians’ and commentators’ assurance that the shots would “stop infection and spread, the vast majority of vaxxers I know “got Covid” multiple times.

Willingness to take statins and Covid shots is/was also driven by the perception that medical insurance or Medicare make medications free or very inexpensive. Consumers love discounts. Perhaps if forced to pay an unsubsidized price for Pharma products, patients would weigh the costs of these products against the purported benefits. Many would decide that buying these medications wasn’t worth giving up, e.g., their streaming service or vacation.

—

Many complain about how much more everything costs these days. When they do, I point out that when a government prints and gives away nine trillion dollars to counteract the effects of a foolishly but widely supported, induced economic coma, as during Coronamania, those who supported the lockdowns and giveaways should have expected inflation to ensue. As they said on 1960s TV ads, “Buy now, pay later.”

In 1965, the national debt was $285 billion. In 2018, it was $23 trillion. Now, it’s $39 trillion. Relative to 2020, today’s dollar is worth seventy cents.

When I note the impoverishing effect of the Covid giveaways, people look at me as if they hadn’t, in 2020-21, considered that Coronamania could cause massive inflation and they change the subject. Six years ago, many insisted that any action or sacrifice was worth it “if it saved just one life.”

Nor does anyone want to discuss the clearly foreseeable effects of school closures or the countless experiences stolen from the young and all others who wanted to live normally.

Few want to discuss Covid shot injuries, either. Though some still insist that these saved millions of lives. I tell them that between 2021-present, at least 11 million American vaxxers, including 15 I knew, have died of non-Covid causes. All of the hundreds of non-jabbers I know are fine.

—

Americans often fail to see cause and effect. Unfortunately, societies, economies and ecosystems are complex. Hence, each bad near-term decision can subsequently cause multiple harms.

For example, “clean energy” windmills on land and sea kill millions of birds. As with solar panel “farms,” manufacturing windmills requires energy-intensive, destructive mining and massive inputs of energy as well as habitat destruction and visual blight. And both these energy technologies depend on non-biodegradable units that must be disposed when they wear out within two decades.

Similarly, in my high-density town and region, groups of deer incongruously roam the streets and small yards. In much of New Jersey, there are between 100-200 deer per square mile. If you entered my state’s woods, you’d see little or no understory of saplings or mid-size trees. The overabundant, predator-free deer have eaten the next generation of trees.

It’s illegal for individuals to shoot deer here. And “progressive” towns like mine don’t hire hunters because animal rights activists oppose culling the herd. Deer lovers don’t consider that today’s silent, springy, big-eyed creatures have weakened forest ecosystems and in so doing, have lessened the populations of many other animals that depend on trees. Fewer trees also mean less carbon sequestration and thus, at least in theory, more dreaded climate change.

The Venn Diagram circle that includes Bambi lovers overlaps almost completely with the circle of those who see global warming as an “existential threat” and the group who supported the Covid nonsense.

Contraceptive-crazy “progressives” want to extend to deer the human model of hormonal birth control. To begin with, this biochemical approach doesn’t much limit deer reproduction. Relatedly, human, hormonal birth control pills cause multiple side effects to those who take them. Additionally, as with other prescription drugs, birth control users excrete their active ingredients into the environment. To their detriment, humans and other animals ingest this chemical brew.

Human birth control pills also delay marriage and conception to ages at which reproductively geriatric parents rely on synthetic hormones to facilitate the various phases of reprotech. This in turn, has seamlessly facilitated sex selection and eugenics, as IVF lab technicians identify gametes and embryos with the genetic traits that customers desire and select.

One could list countless examples of unintended effects of widely used drugs and technologies.

—

Given the obvious illogic and foreseeable damage caused by the Covid response, it clearly wasn’t designed to protect public health. Anyone who thought about what was implemented would have seen that the mitigation and shots were thoroughly phony, opportunistic theater that cynically exploited the majority’s gullibility about a Deadly Virus in order to further enrich the rich and to gain political power.

But most got swept up in hype, emotion, virtue-signaling and peer pressure and gave no thought to the plainly foreseeable consequences of the Covid response they strongly supported. Having failed to think critically when it mattered, few will look back and admit their simple-mindedness and short-sightedness.

When I meet readers, I appreciate that they specify the stories they liked and repeat details from these. Real life teaches us more than do statistics, especially because, as during the Scamdemic, many lie with numbers.

Many readers were amused by the story in which I ate a pizza I found on a sidewalk and how my father would have reacted if he found out. To establish context, I described Dad. For those who haven’t read it and can spare five minutes, that description and story can be found here:

https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/the-power-of-suggestion

In short, pre-Coronamania, my father had always been a no-nonsense guy. Perhaps this was inborn. Or maybe, as with many of his peers, his abiding seriousness reflected that he had seen and experienced some adversity.

Dad grew up during The Depression in a coal and factory town. His miner/father died of black lung at 47. His brother was shot down in a Cold War spy plane over Soviet Armenia and his body was never returned. My father was in the Army between WW II and the Korean War and knew guys who were killed in these. He believed some men had to die to make the world safe for democracy.

For 38 years, from the day he began installing the infrastructure of a New Jersey car and truck assembly plant, Dad typically worked seven days or nights 70+ hours/week there. He told of crawling, without a safety harness or a net, across girders thirty feet above the concrete floor to run the wires needed to power the plant’s electric-intensive equipment, including its long assembly line, with its many arc welders, riveters and sheet metal paint tunnels.

He saw and aided men seriously injured or killed by industrial processes there. The men in the paint sheds wore sweat-inducing Tyvek suits and were blood-tested for lead in the infirmary every Friday. When they failed these tests, they were assigned to another task. When, as a kid, I peered through the small windows into those paint tunnels, I pitied the guys wielding those sprayers. But such jobs paid the bills. And buyers wanted shiny, colored vehicles. Someone had to paint them.

The plant was also a rough place, interpersonally. There were some interpersonal strife and threats—on pay nights, armed robbers lurked in the vast parking lot. Sabotage—some said by communists—was common. As a machinist and later, a foreman, Dad or his crew mates had to repair the damage as fast as they could. Time was money.

Anyone who entered the plant faced a large steel girder twenty feet above grade. A disgruntled colleague had spray-painted “BIG O (my father’s nickname) SUCKS!” across it for all 5,300 employees to see. When asked why someone had written it, Dad grinned and said, “That’s because I make them work!”

Dad maintained a good weight and had a strong grip. But he didn’t closely watch what he ate. He thought that mindful eating was overblown. He largely ate peanut butter crackers and meat and potatoes. During his active youth, coal burned for heat darkened his hometown’s and many other cities’ air, as in the photo above, and it smelled like sulfur dioxide. Half of the adults smoked. From 20-35, Dad also did.

In general, he kept calm, at least outwardly, and carried on. This approach and a few heart stents have more or less worked for him. Nearly 98, he still lives independently.

—

Many men of Dad’s generation and the generations prior were similarly toughened by life, including time in the military. Society expected men of this grizzled generation to accept difficulty and risk with equanimity.

For most of human civilization, men did arduous, dangerous, physical work. Aside from hunting for food, they fought and died in wars, logged forests of thick trees using two-man hand saws in intense heat or cold, laid railroad tracks with hand tools, plowed fields with mules or horses, dug canals or unloaded ships manually, cast and hauled in fish nets unless or until their boats sank or they were washed overboard, worked in steel mills where men were doused to death by molten metal and, if they didn’t fall to their deaths, tossed hot rivets to each other’s buckets before and after eating lunch sitting on skyscraper iron. Just by doing their jobs, they were badasses.

As Jack Nicholson emphasized in A Few Good Men, to run an economy, we needed hard-working, hard-headed, risk-accepting men “on that wall.” Society turned a blind eye to workplace risks because we wanted the goods that workers produced.

When men of Dad’s generation heard others complain about stuff like air pollution or food additives, they would wave their hand dismissively and say something like, “Ah, get out of here with that!” They mocked “do-gooders” for being prissy and causing more harm than benefit.

—

Given the emergence of a more mechanized, computerized economy and mass immigration, over the past few decades many fewer American males have done physical labor. As a sign of the times, while writing this post, I looked for a picture of “men working.” My search yielded many screens of thirty-ish males in front of computer screens before it showed me the above, retro photo. Neither the men of Dad’s generation, or even my fellow Boomers, were baristas. Nor did they “work from home” on their PCs.

Doing hard, hazardous work puts life and risk in perspective. Those who do it learn that suffering is a central part of the human condition. Because most people under 50 haven’t ever done physically challenging work, even during high school or college summers, they’re emotionally softer and less realistic. When the Scamdemic came along, many American males and females didn’t see that life presents much bigger threats than a respiratory virus was said to have presented to fundamentally unhealthy old people who had already lived a decade or more longer than their grandparents and great grandparents.

Most of today’s under-fifty males have also been shielded from other, lesser challenges that even Boomers faced in their youth. Gens X, Y and Z boys played soccer, not football. During gym class, they didn’t wrestle or climb ropes to the gym’s ceiling. They didn’t get into fights with their brothers because there were/are fewer siblings. No one was drafted and only a small fraction considered joining the military.

During my youth, fathers physically disciplined their sons, brusquely told them to “tough it out” and chided them for not doing so. So did males’ coaches and peers. Those who sought to shirk the male code were mocked, “Don’t be a p(an)sy!”

—

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Or at least they each used to be. Such complementarity was generally functional. In any event, the differences between the sexes seemed largely innate.

Aside from his work setting’s effect on my father’s and his colleagues’ worldviews, my father was more rational and practical than my mother. Sometimes, for example, Mom wanted Dad to modify their house in some way. Dad would explain why some of these wishes were impossible or too expensive to fulfill. Mothers told their kids to follow their dreams. Fathers advised kids to seek careers that would enable them to pay their bills. Mom kissed your boo-boos. Dad told you to quit crying and get up. Mom believed most of what she heard. Dad was more skeptical. From a young age, males learn to be. A large percentage of male speech and humor is either bluff, bluster or exaggeration.

Women were/are more idealistic and more social than men were/are. They more readily perceive and discuss interpersonal problems, including in relationships they’re not a part of and they react, at least internally, more strongly to such conflict. While they walk by talking on their iPhones, I often hear women comment exasperatedly about some vexatious person they know.

Most males understand that not everyone will like them and thus, they don’t try as hard to please others as women do. Twice as many Caucasian American women, than men, seek counseling and take antidepressants or anxiety meds.

In general, men are supposed to show less emotion, weigh costs against benefits and accept that things don’t always go well and that not everything can be fixed, at least without causing bigger problems than the one addressed.

Women do more caretaking than men do. Others’ suffering, or the prospect of it, bothers women more than it bothers men. American women are also more body-aware than men and visit MDs far more often than men do. Though men see that women generally outlive them, this doesn’t bother most men, who seem less motivated to live to an advanced age.

Men used to think there was such a thing as trying too hard to help others. Some men think that doing so takes away another person’s sense of responsibility. and dignity. Thus, and because it’s easier, men practice tough love more often than women do.

And as they’ve played and/or watched more sports, men are more apt to see life as zero sum. For every game winner, there’s a loser. Over any sports season, there’s only one champion. Everyone else falls short. Though when today’s thirty-fifty somethings were kids, everyone got trophies. And inflated grades.

More men than women should have seen that there would be far more Covid “mitigation” losers than winners. For every life falsely said to be saved by isolating people from each other, thousands of others experienced depression, weight gain, substance abuse and overdoses. Similarly, many millionaires were created or further enriched via PPP or other government Covid giveaways. But consequently, hundreds of millions who only received paltry stimulus checks have been made poorer via steep and permanent inflation. On the hollow premise of protecting teachers, schoolkids missed out on irreplaceable interpersonal experiences. In addition to the foregoing, Coronamania caused multiple other forms of damage.

—

One weekday morning when I was 11, my father calmly told me his 86-year-old, Polish-speaking-only grandmother, “MomMoo,” who lived with him as he grew up and who we used to visit in Pennsylvania, had just died and that he was heading to his hometown for her wake. He said her life had been hard for the past year and that it was her time.

His serene acceptance of MomMoo’s death made a lasting impression on me. When I visited other nursing home residents a few years later, I saw he was right: not all deaths are tragic.

—

When the Scamdemic came along, why didn’t fathers and grandfathers fulfill their traditional roles and gruffly observe there were much more dangerous things in the world than a virus said to cause deaths of 1% of eighty-year-olds and forcefully disparage the Covid theater?

First, by 2020, most of those who had worked hard jobs and been in the military had died off.

The lack of these experiences made many of today’s adult males physically, emotionally soft and prone to unrealistic safety-ism. Many insisted that anything that might “save just one life” was worth doing. They didn’t consider that various Covid “mitigation” measures would cost or worsen many lives. And some men bit their tongues about the mitigation theater because they didn’t want to upset the domineering or fretful women in their lives.

Moreover, older men hormonally lose their resolve and risk tolerance and become more anxious. The meds, especially the statins, they swallow may exacerbate this emotional frailty. And maybe they’ve consumed too many microplastics or other endocrine disruptors. Or they’re pacified by psych meds or weed. Watching tons of news help.

—

I recently read a 2024 questionnaire-based study comparing men’s and women’s perception of the Covid response.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24006716?__cf_chl_tk=ie8j9lCJ8XRsVKHlJR83h2mrQOLrFzljvgEQeVfJ9K0-1781469706-1.0.1.1-Xg5E5Wci5xdBw5.CDQ6N.KaUo4G.hKVjU7zmeylK9m4

In brief, more women feared The Virus and supported and exhibited marginally greater compliance with preventive measures than men did. By comparison, men displayed more positive views of the “vaccines” and a higher percentage of men, than women, injected. Men reflexively prefer simple, technological solutions.

The male/female difference in shot uptake was larger than the difference re: “mitigation” measures. Women are more attuned to their bodies’ complexity and women saw that the shots had no long-term safety record. But overall, these differences between men and women were marginal.

The study’s conclusions roughly reflect what I’ve seen among the men and women I know. There were slight gender-based differences. More women than men I knew demanded others to stay home, keep six feet apart, mask and test. But I’ve met many more non-injecting women than men.

And many women I’ve met have been among the strongest voices of viral reason. This sub-group of vocal lockdowns and mask opponents saw the Scam much more clearly than the culturally emasculated men I know did. Some women hated what the lockdowns and shot mandates did to them socially and to their children, both living at home or elsewhere.

I suspect that many men and women knew the Covid response was phony but went along because they liked free money, skipping their commutes and mail-in-ballot harvesting.

—

Whatever their reasons, when society most needed men to be men, too many males bought into Coronamania. Instead of appropriately saying, “Get out of here with that nonsense,” too many men became the passive, counterproductive do-gooders their male forebearers disdained. Men failed to fulfill their responsibility to doubt hype, to believe in their intrinsic sturdiness, to take a balanced view of the costs and benefits of the Covid response and to simply keep calm and carry on.

They didn’t, as in Jackson Browne’s song, For Everyman, “come along and hold out that strong, but gentle father’s hand.” Nor, of course, did Browne or his low-testosterone New-Age-male lockdown, mask and vaxx fans act anything like the “grown-ass men” they claim to be.

In general, far too few men said it was unrealistic to radically restructure society over some old people dying and that retreating into a social and economic shell and giving away trillions to rich people will badly hurt kids, both now and for decades. Instead, they naively, timorously and regressively went all-in on the isolation, closures, masks, tests and shots.

Pondering their identity, Devo asked, “Are we not men?” Sadly and consequentially, during the Scamdemic, way too many Covophobic males, including fathers and grandfathers, effectively answered, via their conduct, “Not really.”

About twenty years ago, when the Scamdemic was just a gleam in some globalist’s eye, I received a jury duty notice. Eleven others and I were selected to decide a criminal case.

The defendant, a Middle Eastern airport limo driver nicknamed Sam, had, at 3 AM one weeknight, hit and killed a Mexican immigrant pedestrian carrying a tall lamp, presumably scavenged from curbside garbage, while crossing a Route 1 intersection near the lamp carrier’s trailer park home.

Another driver, a newspaper deliveryman named Alonzo, saw the incident and Sam’s license plate. He informed the police, who found Sam at home less than an hour later. Sam’s car’s hood was distinctly dented.

—

Perhaps because he wasn’t speeding and the victim had crossed the highway against the light, Sam wasn’t charged with some form of vehicular homicide. The only allegation was that he had left the scene without stopping and aiding the person he ran over.

The prosecution presented a thorough array of evidence, including many enlarged photos of the intersection and the damaged black car. Some of the other jurors may have suspected, as I did, that Sam didn’t stop because he would have failed a breathalyzer test and faced more serious charges.

Be that as it may, Sam’s defense, stated only by his attorney during his opening and closing, was that he didn’t know he had hit the lamp carrier. The applicable statute included a “rebuttable presumption” that a driver knew he had hit someone if his car sustained over $250 in damage. The prosecution showed an estimate that repairing the car damage would cost much more than that amount. Thus, the burden of proving he didn’t know of the collision shifted from the State to the defendant.

—

The trial started on a Monday afternoon. Testimony ended late on Wednesday. Fearing cross-examination, Sam didn’t take the stand. Nor did his counsel cross-examine the State’s witnesses. The attorneys delivered summations on Thursday morning. Thereafter, we jury members began deliberating.

Given the law, facts, lack of cross-examination and defendant’s silence, the case was an easy call. Nonetheless, to their credit, the jurors’ strained to concoct some explanation why the driver might not have known his car hit the pedestrian. Each charitable, alt theory was quickly, unanimously dismissed. After less than an hour, we all agreed that the facts and law compelled us to convict.

Then, a chunky, bearded, forty-something man interjected, “Look, it’s Thursday afternoon. If we tell the judge we haven’t reached a verdict, we can come back tomorrow morning, decide by 9:30 and get a three-day weekend.”

Two other jurors supported that approach. But the rest of us promptly shot it down. We either had work piling up or didn’t want to drive significant distances to the county seat just to turn around and drive home an hour later. I observed that we had made up our minds, should say so and return to our normal lives. We did.

The following week, I telephoned the prosecutor to ask why the defendant didn’t take a plea deal. The prosecutor told me his office didn’t offer sentence reductions for such cases. He said the driver and his attorney were simply hoping that some jury member would take pity on a working immigrant and decline to convict.

—

Very few want to discuss the Scamdemic. Those who do cling tightly to the hollow notions that the Covid reaction was appropriate because “The Virus killed over a million people” and/or because “We didn’t know enough about The Virus in March 2020.”

When I hear either of these two explanations, I respond, “If I’m charged with a crime, I hope you’re not on my jury.”

When asked why, I say, “If you believe the Covid death tolls and the mitigation and vaxx lies, you’re prone to believe everything the government and media say. And if you think ‘We didn’t know' in March 2020 that the extreme measures said to contain The Virus would cause far more human harm than benefit, you disregard core facts and have poor judgment.”

People don’t like to hear this. It messes with their belief that they’re open-minded, smarter than average and rebellious. They’ve watched movies or TV shows in which a heroic juror prevented the imprisonment of an innocent man. They perceive themselves as that principled, insightful, holdout juror.

Back in reality, during Coronamania most Americans stampeded with the herd and never considered that public health bureaucrats, politicians, the media and, unbeknownst to them, Defense Department operatives were lying to and railroading the public with a deeply fake “Pandemic” narrative. They were conned by the hyperbolic death and case tickers and videos of morgue trucks or hospital patients hooked to ventilators.

Somehow most Americans didn’t notice that the average ostensible Covid victim died at the same age as did the average person. Nor did they weigh the severe economic, social and psychological damage the lockdowns and later, the shots, would plainly cause.

Instead, most showed a simple-minded, group-thinking, fear-driven, pro-government bias. Others liked the excitement of a pseudo-crisis or getting free money to stay home. Hence, in Spring 2020, the vast majority of people asked no questions about a series of unprecedented and extensive government mandates that simply didn’t add up.

—

Unlike state or federal prosecutors in a trial, officials who advocated the Covid lockdowns, masks and tests weren’t ever asked to present competent evidence, logic, scientific or legal sources or precedents to support these oppressive, yet downright goofy measures. Nor were those unconvinced of the “mitigation measures’” worth allowed to cross-examine, or challenge the logic or legal authority of, the Scamdemic’s orchestrators in a judicial, legislative or administrative proceeding.

The Scamdemicians only allowed fear-mongering media outlets to interview them. And the media asked no serious questions and refused to publish “mitigation” critiques. Social media platforms aggressively censored dissent. There was no debate or dialectic, much less a formal inquiry.

The majority of the public who supported the “mitigation” measures were driven by conformity, emotion, lassitude and/or avarice, not inquiry or reason. Those defrauded by the government and media viral propaganda blitz demanded hundreds of millions of people to radically alter their lives based on very sketchy hearsay evidence.

Similarly, before “vaccines” were mandated in 2021, pro-injection witnesses should have been questioned and thus, forced to admit that, in order to make the shots seem more effective, Pharma’s brief clinical trials were tainted by “healthy vaccinee bias,” that jab backers conflated “relative risk reduction” with “absolute risk reduction,” that the companies misleadingly defined who was “unvaccinated,” and that the trials didn’t examine either long-term shot efficacy or safety. Instead of engaging in dialogue, a priori “vaccine” supporters vilified vaxx opponents as MAGA members, even though many non-vaxxers lambasted Trump for initiating and boasting about Operation Warp Speed.

—

Governmental bodies conduct hearings regarding a wide array of proposed governmental or quasi-governmental actions. Anyone who gets a speeding ticket, a notice of an increase in utility bills or bus fares or a local construction project has the right to oppose the proposed official action. The lockdowns, closures, mask and test mandates and trillion-dollar giveaways caused exponentially more harm than in any of the matters subject to hearings in the contexts just mentioned.

Federal, state and local government officials who wanted to lock down a society should have, in mid-March 2020, been subjected to nationally-televised and Net-streamed public interrogation. The lockdowns, masks and shots were also infinitely more damaging than was the Watergate break-in or the January 6 protests, each of which occasioned lengthy, broadcasted hearing sessions. During Covid response hearings, a moderator could have managed the scope and duration of testimony and documents admissible under litigation evidence rules. Two days would have sufficed.

The questions would have written themselves. Congress members, journalists or citizens could have challenged “expert” declarations. Anyone with an open mind would have asked:

“Why would the worst virus in history—the only one for which we would ever lock down—suddenly emerge from a bat or pangolin?”

“Don’t American officials typically disbelieve Chinese government pronouncements, data or videos?”

“Doesn’t the World Economic Forum’s “Pandemic Planning” 2019 exercise show that “The Pandemic” and the 2020 response were pre-arranged?”

“Why should healthy people under 70 be locked down when it’s clear that only the old and baseline sick are at any risk, and only tiny risk at that?”

“Will the lockdowns and closures really end in two weeks?”

“If this lockdown will only last two weeks, why are we spending or printing six trillion dollars to respond to a virus?” (Most people don’t well differentiate between millions, billions and trillions. To them, these all sound about the same).

“Won’t such spending cause sharp, permanent inflation?’

“Isn’t it a terrible idea to keep kids and their teachers who are nearly all under 55 and at no viral risk, home from school?”

“Where is the legal authority to nullify constitutional rights simply by declaring an emergency over a virus?”

None of these questions had a plausible answer.

—

Besides the illogic and legal invalidity of the mitigation measures, the failure to conduct pre-lockdown hearings itself revealed the viral response was a Scam. Those who tell the truth and have facts and logic backing their position should be eager to present their case and defend themselves.

Much of the public bought the Scamdemic because the media and government propaganda blitz and censorship crusades created the illusion that everyone supported the NPIs and shots. Conducting hearings would have conveyed the meta-message that those who didn’t buy in had made some good points.

NPI advocates would have objected, in mid-March 2020, that there was no time for such deliberation because people were dying en masse. This was untrue. By then, of 330+ million Americans, fewer than 100—very old and baseline unhealthy—were (falsely) said to have died of Covid.

Under these facts and as in the criminal matter I heard as a juror, “We didn’t know” was a foundational lie. We had plenty of data from Italy and Spain, cruise and naval vessels to know that The Deadly Virus was only potentially fatal if you were very old and infirm. And even then, very seldom so.

—

If, in March 2020, public hearings, including cross-examination, regarding business and school closures, masks and tests had been held and if shot mandaters were required in January, 2021, to publicly answer questions about these measures, the public could have seen the Scam and opposed the NPIs and shot mandates when it would have mattered.

Not only couldn’t The Scamdemic’s orchestrators have sustained their burden of proof. Their cross-examination testimony would have disgraced them for life. They would have looked like Khrushchev being questioned by Adlai Stevenson.

When Coronamania began, many resembled the opportunistic juror in the hit-and-run case who wanted to disingenuously drag out deliberations and get paid to skip work. Public school teachers were especially numerous and loathsome in this regard. But as in that above-mentioned jury room, after hearing the public health bureaucrats fail epically when questioned, a majority of viewers may have rejected such lazy chicanery and demanded that life go on as normal.

On Saturday night, February 11, 2012, I sang the Star-Spangled Banner, a capella, at center court before a nationally, ESPN-televised, sold-out Princeton-Harvard basketball game at Princeton’s Jadwin Gym. Doing so was thrilling and enthusiastically received by the capacity crowd of over 7,000. I worried that I might forget the lyrics. But I didn’t.

In the week leading up to the game, I called a Princeton Engineering grad friend—who later very unsmartly bought the Scamdemic—to tell him I was going to perform the national anthem at his alma mater. My friend knew that, though I had no formal musical training, I could carry a tune, at least within a limited range, and had written and recorded a dozen songs that have been on the radio. But having heard my CD, he also knew that I didn’t have the type of voice normally chosen to deliver that bombastic, pre-game number. Think maybe of Joe Strummer or Shane MacGowan.

At first, he laughed off the possibility. “No, come on, seriously…”

When I assured him I wasn’t joking, his normally enthusiastic voice wavered. I could tell he was worried I’d do a really bad job and be booed out of the arena.

Trying not to insult me, he replied, “I mean…are you sure…I mean, uh…”

“Yes,” I interjected, “I’m sure. I’ve been practicing. It’s gonna be good. Buy a ticket and tell me what section and row it’s in. After I perform, I’ll meet you and we’ll watch the game together.”

When Saturday night came and I got done singing, the packed crowd roared its approval and the student section chanted, “USA! USA! USA! USA!”

And as I walked off the court, the Princeton coach and former player, Mitch Henderson, looked me in the eye and said, “Nice job.”

After the performance, I walked up to my friend’s seat in the upper corner of the arena, smiled and said, “See, I told you I was going to sing the National Anthem!”

I did what I said I was going to do. It was fun. I’ll never forget it.

—

All of the foregoing is true.

But I left out one part. I didn’t sing alone. I sang alongside nine co-workers, one of whom got us the unpaid gig because he knew Princeton’s Athletic Director. The group included six women. They wanted a fourth male voice to give the group more bass. Singing is like dancing. Women are better at it than men are. But they need some males to accompany them so a man only needs a basic skill set to be appreciated.

I went to a lunchtime audition and did well enough that they let me in the group. We practiced during two other lunch hours. To get my harmony right, I had to stuff cotton in my left ear so I could hear the guy to my right better, because he was singing the same part I was supposed to sing.

—

The Scamdemic was built on a stack of outright government and media lies and half-truths, including that: The Virus killed healthy people of all ages, it spread asymptomatically, the PCR tests reflected consequential l infection and those who died in the hospitals died from, not with The Virus. Neither the government nor the media told the public that hospitals were lavishly subsidized to categorize those who died as “Covid deaths” and that many of the ostensible victims were on last legs to begin with and/or were ventilated, dehydrated and sedated or otherwise medicated to death.

Later, in order to hide vaxx-driven deaths, Pharma officials defined all of those who died within 42 days of the shots as “unvaccinated.” Doctors also declined to inject those who were very frail, because they knew the shots might hasten their demise.

The government and media badly bent the Covid truth in many other ways that I’ve previously discussed.

—

In Coronamania’s aftermath, the Scamdemic’s orchestrators continue to sell the “shots saved us” narrative. Doing so is an attempt to justify the unjustifiable and extremely destructive lockdowns, closures, masks and testing and tracing. The hollow premise is that theatrical measures protected us until the shots became available. Ultimately, jab adulation is designed to build support for misspending hundreds of billions more on “Pandemic Preparedness,” especially more “vaccines.” The more money wasted on viral hyperbole, the more millions of poor, young people will continue to die each year from affordably preventable and treatable diseases like malaria and TB.

While many credit the 2020-21 shots for ending Covid, according to the official stats, Covid deaths didn’t drop until late 2022, when the government ended hospital and family subsidies for attributing deaths to Covid. Additionally, many of the frailest Americans had already died in the two years prior. Some say that by 2022, The Virus had mutated into even less lethal forms and, in contrast to 2020-21, hospitals began to apply non-lethal treatments, thus lowering ostensible Covid deaths. Despite, or more likely because of, the shots, excess deaths remain above 2019 levels.

Instead of “the shots saved us” myth, truth-seekers should consider how many of the jabbed have died or been vaxx-injured. As I’ve previously noted, every one of the fourteen people I know who’ve died in the past five years had been injected.

I’m not saying the shots caused all these deaths, though given the shots’ timing and the baseline health of the decedents, I suspect the shots did cause some to die earlier from non-viral causes. Regardless, the shots didn’t “save the lives” of these fourteen. The people I know must resemble the people that others know. In the US alone, millions of jabbers have died in the past five years.

I also know multiple people who sustained vaxx injuries. What I’ve seen can’t be unique here, either. By now, for example, it’s widely acknowledged that some mRNA injectors have developed myocarditis. What are the odds that the shots would cause this inflammatory condition and not cause other systemic inflammation or other latent, forms of harm?

In addition to those who died or were injured, all of the injectors I can think of—every single one—has “gotten Covid” multiple times after injecting. Probabilistically, given that many vaxxers in my realm have died, been injured or gotten The Virus multiple times post-injection, many others whom I don’t know must also have suffered these shot effects.

—

Recently, I’ve read various studies that concluded, as do public health bureaucrats and Trump, that the shots “saved millions of lives.” These conclusions were based on models, as were the grossly inaccurate model predictions used to justify the 2020 lockdowns. Models are guesses about what might have happened if various measures weren’t taken. These exercises are based on multiple assumptions applied to dubious data. Those who develop models can easily derive desired conclusions.

Regarding shot efficacy, for example, some modelers have misleadingly applied an inflated Infection Fatality Rate. If one exaggerates Covid deaths, it makes the shots seem like they saved far more lives than they actually did.

—

I recently read this headline in an online publication named SciTech Daily:

“2.5 Million Lives Saved: The Untold Story of COVID Vaccines’ Global Impact”

When people read such a headline, they internalize the notion that the shots worked great.

The study summary says:

“Between 2020 and 2024, COVID-19 vaccinations are estimated to have prevented 2.5 million deaths worldwide. That means one life was saved for every 5,400 vaccine doses given.”

Assuming the data on which the model was based are close to accurate, saving one life for every 5,400 shots is extremely low yield. What type of medical treatment works once in 5,400 times it’s applied? That one success seems more like an extreme outlier than an actual effect. If a treatment only works that infrequently, one should wonder why it might work at all. Ultimately, that modeler says that 5,399 of every 5,400 injectors didn’t benefit from the shots. It’s what statisticians call a poor “odds ratio.”

That model/study conceded that 9 of 10 deaths averted and 8 of 10 life-years saved were among those over 60. While most people are healthy over 60, many aren’t and die during that decade, virus or no virus. Thus, “saving life-years” of those over 60 is a commensurately lower-yield outcome than it might appear to be. And although this model concluded that the shots provided almost no life-saving effects to those under 60, the shots were widely mandated for billions of people much younger than 60.

Modelers also disingenuously suggest that injecting younger individuals may have diminished transmission to older, vulnerable individuals. But the shots weren’t tested for their ability to stop infection and spread. When rolled out, they widely, visibly failed in this regard. As the vaxxed I know were far more likely to get Covid than were the unvaxxed, why should I believe the shots saved lives?

—

None of the models I reviewed considered deaths caused by the shots. One report conceded that randomized trial data are very limited. Why is there plenty of grant money to fund studies to support the false narrative of vaxx efficacy but no money to study vaxx-induced deaths or injuries? Even if funded, such analyses might be inconclusive because few jab victims were autopsied. As Substacker Bill Rice often observes, people—in this case, coroners, pathologists or medical researchers—don’t look for things they don’t want to find.

And the young who died after vaxxing each lost decades of life-years.

—

Other studies, which those who conducted the SciTech-reported study forcefully criticized as having exaggerated vaxx success, claimed the shots saved up to 14 million lives.

Coincidentally, I recently saw an alternative model that concluded the shots killed 14 million people and disabled 60 million and injured 500 million more.

But even using the most vaxx-favorable figure I found, for every 900 shots given, one life was saved. If a doctor told me that Treatment X had only a one-in-nine-hundred chance of helping me, I would decline it. This is especially true if, as with the shots, Treatment X had no long-term safety record.

As a whole, the vaxx life-saving figures show that Covid wasn’t anything close to a society-wide threat to life. But anyone paying attention knew that in March 2020.

—

Instead of studies and models, I trust what I see. It’s hard for me to believe the vaxxes were mass-scale lifesavers when I don’t know anyone who died from the Virus. It’s also hard to believe that the shots saved lives when the injectors I knew became sick far more commonly and frequently than did I, my wife and the other non-vaxxers I knew.

Praising the shots for “saving millions of lives” reminds me of my work colleagues’ rendition of the national anthem. The group didn’t succeed because of me. If anything, we sounded good despite my participation. Though unlike the shots, I’m pretty sure my harmony didn’t kill or injure anyone who heard it.

While managing community gardens during peak Scamdemic, I routinely disparaged the lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and shots to those with whom I spoke. Some agreed with me. Most didn’t.

During one such discussion, a retired Ob-Gyn who had a garden plot and drove a late-model Infiniti reported that her grandson expressed deep disappointment that the school closures and travel bans were preventing him from taking classes and going to Europe, where he could advance his fashion career. She told him he needed to put others’ health first and to not resent doing so. She said, “This experience will build character.”

I strongly disagreed with her. I observed that making one’s way in life was hard enough for young people under normal conditions but that being young afforded opportunities available at no other age and that her grandson and hundreds of millions of young people in many nations would never get this stolen time back.

I added that neither she nor her same-aged peers had ever faced a similarly protracted, extensive and unwarranted disruption. I emphasized that The Virus wasn’t nearly as dangerous as touted—it posed zero threat to college students—and that those who saw others as viral vectors could protect themselves by staying home.

When the Covid shots came out, I told the Ob-Gyn that I wouldn’t take them. She told me that because I didn’t understand immunology, I didn’t know how good the shots were. I laughed, repeated how unscary The Virus was and asked what special knowledge her medical education and experience gave her re: vaccines, especially new, mRNA-based ones. Her brief reply was vague and circular. I told her so.

Given the vaxxes’ failure to stop infection and spread and the deaths and injuries the shots have caused, I shake my head at the memory of those two exchanges and others like them. Although I didn’t have a medical degree and wore soiled and sweaty cut-offs and drove an old economy car, I must have known a few things about The Science that the well-dressed, self-assured Ob-Gyn and similarly smug others didn’t.

During Coronamania, many people made assertions backed by no competent evidence. Many of these people were nonetheless falsely deemed, or saw themselves as, experts or journalists.

By March 1, 2020, life experience, basic biology and statistics, logic, history and independent reading told me that The Virus was badly overblown. For the same reasons, I later concluded that injecting an unnecessary substance with no long-term safety record was a poor idea. Having a cold or the flu sucks but trying to avoid these wasn’t worth wrecking the society, the economy or your body. I tried to warn anyone who would listen.

Unlike every injectee I knew, I’ve had zero—not three or four—upper-respiratory-infections since the jabs came out. Plus, every one of the fourteen people I’ve known who’ve died in the past five years had been jabbed. I think this trend is common, though most people fail, or choose not, to see it among the decedents they knew.

—

On some of the recent evenings after I’ve played morning basketball and/or worked on some home project, I feel fatigued. On those nights, Ellen and I have defaulted to watching various documentary TV shows during and after our 7:45 PM dinners.

A few weeks ago, we stumbled onto a program called The Grandma Stand. A series of faux grandmas in their late sixties and early seventies sat behind a DIY’d table/booth made from repurposed wooden pallets. Painted purple to suggest fun and human warmth, these small structures enticed some twenty and thirty-something passersby in New York City’s Central Park to sit down and talk to an unrelated female senior citizen across the table.

As do uniforms in professional settings, using a table with a sign connoted some measure of legitimacy and credibility. It also whimsically evoked echoes of Lucy dispensing ten-cent advice in the Peanuts comic strip, though enough years have passed since that cartoon’s heyday that those in their twenties or thirties who sat down to chat with one of the surrogate grandmas may not have recognized the pop culture allusion. And unlike Lucy’s, the TV grandma’s advice was free.

To provide some focus to these unlicensed psychotherapy sessions, the show’s producers wrote, in large letters on a chalkboard in front of the table, a question du jour such as “What’s something you’re working on?” Or “What person do you miss and want to say something to?” Or “What stands between you and happiness?”

Perhaps motivated by the desire to be on TV, various young adult males and females d unburdened themselves to their make-believe grandma. Often, Black grandmas were paired with White advisees. And vice versa. Some advisees of vague ethnicity spoke excellent, albeit accented, English, indicating that they had been born outside the US.

The young adults shared such concerns as:

“My mother was engaged when she was my age. I’m not even dating anyone. I feel behind schedule in life.”

Or “My parents never express their emotions and I want to understand them better.”

Or “I’ve found it hard to make friends here.”

Or “My mother told me I should be saving for a house but I can barely afford rent and food.”

In response, the grandmas typically, formulaically followed up with “How does that make you feel?”

The ersatz grandmas had a box of tissues ready and offered these to those who wept while speaking about their challenges or perceptions.

After hearing the young table visitors’ responses, the grandma reassured them by expressing trite, questionable college-dorm-poster notions like “Life has no schedule. Things happen when they’re supposed to happen.”

To a thirty-ish man whose mother said he should be saving for a house, the booth’s grandma replied, her memory undoubtedly playing tricks on her, “When I was your age, the only food I could afford was oatmeal.”

To one table visitor who said she felt isolated in the midst of New York City, the TV elder suggested, “Maybe you could join a book club.”

At the end of each televised 90-second excerpt, each visitor smiled and thanked their pretend grandma, who smiled back. Sometimes the two shook hands warmly or grandma offered a hug. When her offer was accepted, grandma stood up, walked around the table and the two embraced before one of them reflexively tapped the other’s back. It’s a funny, universal signal.

I thought it might also been funny to see grandma offer a hug and for her advisee to respond, “Uh, no thanks, I’m uncomfortable having strangers touch me” or “I’m kind of afraid of germs.”

Maybe that happens sometimes and they don’t show it.

I also imagined a Grandpa Stand at which a seventy-five-year-old male growls at a melancholy twenty-something to “Get a grip on reality! Your life is easy! There are millions of people who don’t have enough to eat and people your age who can’t walk!”

But I get it: feel-good, painstakingly PC TV has wider appeal than tough love, especially to PBS viewers.

And this being contemporary America, The Grandma Stand concept has predictably been franchised, and presumably monetized, in seven other cities.

—

I understand that people need to feel listened to and that, when others listen, it can lift the speaker’s spirits. And I like the concept of intergenerational and interracial support and consolation. But in reality, most young people don’t welcome transgenerational connection as strongly as seniors do. Many of the young feel their elders—both parents and grandparents—have no wisdom to offer because those older than them don’t understand modern life. In America, youthful disdain for elders’ advice seems almost traditional in and of itself. Besides, older people look older.

While The Grandma Stand interactions have superficial appeal to TV viewers and many of the young appreciated what faux grandma told them, seeing this show made me think the young may be right to conclude that grandmas are out of touch. Although today’s twenty and thirty-somethings face some of the same challenges grandma faced back in the day, the culture and the economy have changed dramatically over the past fifty years. The differences between the young’s and old’s frames of reference make it hard for older people to understand what the young are up against.

To begin with, screen and device culture and the attendant information overload, image management and interpersonal restructuring entailed depart sharply from decades prior. Relatedly, today’s youth have a paralyzing, though perhaps illusory, range of consumer and life choices. In theory, nearly every product, mate, trip or job are within reach. But in reality, it’s almost impossible for the young to fulfill this wide range of high aspirations. And even if the young attain something for which they’ve strived, knowing that they had other options or that someone they know seems to be doing something better can make the young second-guess any road not taken. While our culture exalts choice, having too many choices can make people less happy.

Simultaneously, in-person community and religious identities and practice have attenuated. In their place, young people have been socioeconomically indoctrinated into a secular, macropolitical tribe, which, as do the Amish, shuns apostates by blocking them online. Today’s youth are also more likely to use psych meds or more concentrated forms of THC than their grandmas did. These substances can either cause or follow disengagement or depression.

When they weren’t counseling strangers, several of the temporary grandmas told an interviewer that their time with younger people showed the grandmas that there’s “an anxiety epidemic” among the young.

—

As I watched the Grandma Stand sessions, I couldn’t help but notice that the Covid “mitigation” measures or shots had caused or worsened the problems that grandma’s visitors brought up.

For example, I don’t doubt that some latter-day grandmas had hard jobs and little money in their twenties and thirties. And raising kids, as women used to do in that age range, can be hard. But exaggerating about, e.g., an oatmeal-only diet trivializes young peoples’ concerns about their financial circumstances and prospects. It disregards that because Coronamania induced an economic coma, many young people, often with tens of thousands of student debt, couldn’t find work for extended periods. I’ve heard that 2026’s employment prospects are markedly worse than those when grandma was their age.

Back then, the federal government hadn’t run up $39 trillion in debt, much of it from Covid giveaways. Consequently, when the old were young, they didn’t have the record, impoverishing inflation of the past six years and the consequent higher interest rates. When mortgage rates were lower, houses and rent were far more affordable. And twenty-two-year-old grandma didn’t have to compete for jobs with millions of Covid/Biden Era immigrants or worry about AI making her job skills obsolete.

Estrangement from same age peers and family was also a recurring Grandma Stand theme. Isolating young people from each other over a virus that didn’t threaten them intensified such loneliness. Depression and drug use increased sharply. Strangers and co-workers who might have met during that period, didn’t. And disagreements over the Covid response strained or ended friendships and family ties. As far as I can tell, few of these broken relationships have been restored.

Many young adults lack a mate and children. The Scamdemic’s postponement of male/female pairing has lowered fertility. Further, few people have read enough about the Covid shots to know that these have been found to deplete female lab rats’ oocyte reserves. Given their support for the shots, most Ob-Gyns seem not to have considered this possibility and I suspect that few of them know about thus study. If this trend extends to humans, many women and their male mates will become sad and angry to learn that the shots have prevented them from creating daughters and sons. There won’t be enough tissue boxes for those who might find themselves so injured.

Despite Coronamania’s long, dark shadow, no Grandma Stand advisee nor grandma mentions the Covid fearmongering, closures, masks, injections or the isolation, anxiety, social conflict and economic damage the Scamdemic entailed. If they were to mention it, they would blame The Virus, not the overreaction to it. They would begin their analyses by trotting out the historically-misframing phrases “During Covid…” or “During The Pandemic…”

I strongly suspect those who opted to be Grandma Stand counselors were lockdown and school closure-supporting masker/vaxxers. Just as they do when counseling Grandma Stand visitors, those who supported the deeply damaging Covid response see themselves, and many TV viewers seem them, as engaged, empathetic social benefactors. They bought and recited such hollow, hortatory slogans as “If it only saves one life, it’s worth it,” “We’re all in this together” and “My mask protects you.”

The ersatz grandmas’ support for the Covid response caused far more damage than any individual counseling or encouragement can undo. Lockdown and vaxx-supporting make-believe grandmas’ current attempts to console young people resembles burning down a young person’s house and then letting them sleep over at grandma’s for a few nights while she bakes them cookies. It doesn’t come close to fixing the damage done.

The TV grandmas, or the program’s editors, either don’t see or don’t want to openly acknowledge the harm that the Covid response has done to the young. Most grandmas still think it was right to keep young people home, to mask and inject them and for the government to run up trillions in debt via Covid giveaways. Pretending to protect other people in these ways was falsely seen as virtuous.

Instead of recognizing that they when they were young, the gtandmas had gotten to live a vital, unlocked-down life. They should have seen that no young person should have stayed home for one day to protect grandma and said so publicly and repeatedly. Instead, most grandmas and grandpas bought and backed the viral hysteria. And though Coronamania’s predictable harms to the young are still literally right in front of them, the oblivious open-air grandmas said they found “fulfillment” advising young people struggling to find happiness in a culture permanently damaged by a viral Scam.

For most of my 30 years as an attorney, I did environmental litigation. These cases often involved serious contamination that cost millions of dollars to clean up. Such matters typically lasted five years. Some lasted longer. Handling these cases, one learns about pollution, ground water, hydrogeology, chemistry, the litigation process and corporate and governmental shenanigans.

One should also learn patience. Though I never did.

Some of these cases involved landfills. As follows, several basic concepts and principles applied to such matters.

Before the 1980s, landfills indiscriminately accepted a wide array of toxic materials from industries and households. Given gravity and the cumulative, crushing weight of decades of garbage and years of rainfall and snowmelt, liquid and soluble wastes were rinsed toward landfills’ bottoms and, from there, into surface water or ground water.

Government environmental entities and their attorneys tried to compel companies and towns who dumped hazardous materials at a given landfill to pool large sums of money to pay for cleanups, typically by building and operating groundwater treatment systems at these sites.

After years of litigation and haggling, remedial agreements were reached. A deal was a deal and a cleanup occurred.

Usually.

—

Nearly two decades after the original complaint was filed in 1980, I took over a case involving the fourth-worst site on the federal Superfund list. The case involved a Camden County, New Jersey landfill, which was owned and operated by a sand and gravel company beginning in the late 1950s. The facility began accepting garbage, principally from Philadelphia and Camden, after the sand company had dug a hole multiple stories deep and 60 acres across. When the landfill closed in the early 1980s, it was over 10 stories tall. I climbed to its top one day. I could see your house from there.

At this landfill, the liquid waste was released to a local stream through a large metal pipe, basically a spigot. It gushed a steady, high-volume of deeply discolored, malodorous contamination 24/7/365. This outfall pipe resembled the above photo except that the contaminant flow would have knocked over anyone who tried to stand in front of it.

In 1997, following 17 years of litigation, negotiation, extensive public comment and review and a hearing, over 150 waste generators settled the suit by signing a Consent Decree. The dumpers agreed to build a multi-million-dollar on-site water treatment system that, instead of allowing the toxic brew to continue to flow into a local stream, would, via an underground pipeline, send a cleaner version of this nasty “leachate” to the county wastewater treatment facility twelve miles away. There, blended with massive volumes of regional household wastewater and excrement, it would be further treated and pumped into the wide Delaware River. From there, the double-treated water would roll south past Walt Whitman’s Camden birthplace 70 miles to the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Dilution is often part of the solution to pollution.

—

In 2000, that landfill remediation case began to foreshadow the 2020 Covid overreaction.

Shortly before the landfill’s on-site treatment system was to be switched on, testing revealed low levels of radioactivity, a/k/a “radionuclides,” in the landfill. This was unsurprising, as radioactive materials were commonly part of the broad spectrum of toxics that ended up in landfills and because prior testing had also shown their presence. Nevertheless, based on the radionuclide data, a local citizens’ group incited fear and mobilized local opposition. This case became Philly front-page and TV news.

While many people fear radioactivity, the amount of such contamination matters. The landfill’s post-treatment effluent was only very mildly radioactive. It met drinking standards for radionuclides. To contextualize the landfill’s radionuclide levels, many medical procedures use radioactive materials. Individuals who submit to x-rays, cancer treatments and CAT scans routinely excrete radionuclides into their sewer systems. Consequently, sewer samples near hospitals or senior citizen housing have distinctly elevated radionuclide levels. The public unknowingly accepts such environmental radioactivity. No one says “Boo.”

The 2001 radionuclide controversy triggered a series of public hearings. One of these sessions packed a high school gym. In front of TV cameras, local residents held signs saying things like “Hell No, We Won’t Glow.” They raged against switching on the landfill’s on-site pollution treatment system because doing so would send (very slightly) radioactive contamination through underground sewage pipes that ran beneath their neighborhoods.

On that hot, testy night, a surly, overweight white guy railed that environmental officials and politicians didn’t care about his health and that the radiation that would soon pass through a subterranean neighborhood pipe would kill him. As he bellowed, a pack of cigarettes bulged through his short-sleeved shirt pocket.

Just as from 2000-2003, those who lived near the landfill freaked out about dying from very mild radiation exposure, in 2020-2023, tens of millions of Americans freaked out about dying from a respiratory virus that threatened only the very frail.

Further, as during Coronamania’s disregard for the lockdowns, school closure and multi-trillion-dollar giveaway’s effects, the major downside of preventing the operation of an on-site cleanup, i.e., continued high-volume, highly concentrated contamination comprising many non-radioactive substances, was ignored. In neither instance did the fearful perform any risk assessment or cost/benefit analysis. Instead, in both contexts, demagoguery, hysteria and zero tolerance ruled the day.

—

So did politics.

In November 2003, a pivotal state legislative race was to occur in the landfill’s district. Control of the state legislature hinged on that close contest. Polling indicated that that election’s outcome depended on how strongly the candidates opposed the switching on of the landfill’s on-site treatment system, because doing so would send very low levels of radionuclides through local underground pipes. Thus, both political parties tried to out-oppose each other regarding on-site contaminant treatment and transmission of treated wastewater to the county wastewater treatment plant, where it would be further cleaned and pumped into the river.

Behind closed doors in Trenton, the ruling Democrats pressured DEP to reverse course and oppose the operation of a treatment system it had taken decades to force the dumpers to pay for and build. After receiving marching orders from the State House, DEP management did a scientifically inexplicable 180. For the first time, DEP argued against cleaning up contamination. It seemed very suspicious.

While the political fray and legal maneuvering went on, the landfill treatment system remained idle. Consequently, the full array of the far more harmful, more concentrated, non-radioactive contamination continued to flow into the stream.

—

Though I had worked on the case for three years and made all of the court appearances during that time, I didn’t present the eleventh-hour argument against commencing the long overdue treatment. I refused to advocate against switching on the treatment system, which DEP and I had sought during those three years because it would significantly improve the environment. In my place, the Attorney General sent a more compliant colleague to advocate keeping the treatment system idle.

Thankfully, presiding United States District Court Judge Simandle saw through DEP’s politically-motivated change of heart. Citing the 1997 Consent Decree, he ordered the treatment system to be switched on forthwith. The decision, which, between its lines, drips with judicial disdain for public ignorance regarding the treatment system’s benefits and DEP’s dishonest, environmentally-unfriendly about-face, can be read here:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/264/165/2507402/

—

As the above landfill story shows, no one should assume that government officials tell the truth. Well before my involvement in the above-summarized case, I’ve known that government officials lie. There have been, for example, multiple instances in which the US government has lied to the public to start wars.

Further, it’s clear from listening to what candidates say both before and after they gain office that politicians lie. So do bureaucrats and cops. Not all the time. Perhaps not even most of the time. But not infrequently, either. As the stakes grow, so do the lies.

During Coronamania, government officials plainly, repeatedly lied. Neither the US nor any of its states had ever previously locked down over a respiratory virus. By doing so in 2020, government officials effectively asserted, without proof or allowing counterargument, that this virus was the worst in human history.

The foundational assertion that a super-virus had spontaneously emerged in wet-market animals defied basic biology. Why, evolutionarily, would a virus seeking to propagate itself kill so many of its hosts? In addition to such deception about viral origins, those who sold Scamdemic terror also suppressed information about the use of antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections and steroids to treat respiratory and systemic inflammation. The Covid terrorists also censored those who pointed out what should have been obvious lies in the official Covid narrative.

Above all, data widely available in February 2020 from Italy, Spain and cruise and naval ships showed that if the much-hyped virus killed anyone, it only slightly hastened death for a small fraction the old and very unhealthy. Thus, there was never a scientific basis to isolate healthy adults from each other, much less to close schools full of people under 30. Or later, to require them to inject an experimental substance.

Last week, during a Congressional hearing, CIA whistleblower James Erdman testified that Anthony Fauci knew “The Deadly Virus” had been leaked from a lab and that Fauci covered this up because he had funded gain-of-function research.

A few days after Erdman’s testimony, Fauci’s former NIH colleague, Robert Redfield, corroborated Erdman’s lab leak declaration and Fauci’s efforts to cover it up. Especially given the lack of refutation, Erdman’s account rings true.

Democrats boycotted the hearing. The legacy media and most of its Internet counterparts ignored what should have been a major story. Erdman’s lab-leak cover-up testimony was the Scamdemic Era equivalent of, and infinitely more important than, John Dean’s 1973 Congressional testimony about the Watergate break-in causing a “cancer on the Presidency.” Dean’s and others’ testimony about that cover-up were national news all summer and forced a president to resign.

—

Viral origins aren’t nearly as consequential as was the Covid response. Whatever “The Novel Coronavirus” was—or wasn't—the extreme governmental and media overreaction, not the virus itself, caused vast social and economic destruction. Whether The Virus was natural or man-made, it was exponentially less lethal than it was hyped to be.

Anyone paying attention knew, from decades of life experience, that respiratory viruses weren’t deadly enough to justify any of the Covid “mitigation” measures. Nearly all who died during prior flu outbreaks were old and baseline unhealthy. February and March 2020 data from the Italy, Spain, cruise and naval ship data confirmed that the “novel coronavirus” was about as deadly as the flu.

It’s either ignorant or disingenuous to say, as many still do, that “We didn’t know” this in mid-March 2020.

Accordingly, throughout 2020-24, healthy persons under 70 should have lived normally. No one should have been masked or tested. Schools shouldn’t have closed for one day. Instead of multi-trillions, zero federal dollars should have been spent on “coronavirus assistance and relief.” No one should have been injected with an experimental, unnecessary substance that lacked a long-term safety record.

—

With profound sadness, I must inform you that those who directed the Covid response deliberately caused profound, irreversible damage. They didn’t want to protect you. They sought to wreck your lives, divide you from family, friends and neighbors and permanently impoverish, spy on and censor you and dictate how you live.

While the Covid response is a fait accompli, the wet market myth deserves to be exposed and repeated because it reflects that those who directed the Covid response lied throughout. Natural origins were a central element of the official Scamdemic narrative. Those who sold the wet market story asserted that those who said The Virus was leaked from a lab were tin-hat conspiracists.

The tin-hatters seemed to have been right, not just about a lab leak but the entire Covid story. Confronting the Covid terrorists and their apologists with evidence of a lab leak should discredit Fauci, Birx, Collins, Gates, WHO, DOD, governors, mayors and the media who relentlessly promoted both bat or pangolin origins and purportedly counteractive Covid theater.

It’s too bad the government’s Covid interventions weren’t reviewed by an objective judge who, as Judge Simandle did in my landfill case, would have methodically called out the government’s lies and ended the viral theater.

Though ego has prevented most from admitting they were wrong to support Coronamania, the lab leak narrative deserves to be repeated widely and endlessly because it might belatedly change some minds about the overarching Scam.

Most people want to pretend the Scamdemic never happened and still refuse to believe their government and media lied to them about The Virus. Losing faith in their institutional guardians leaves them feeling vulnerable and adrift. Despite clear evidence that governments grossly abused their authority, those who bought Coronamania still make excuses for their abusers, as do domestic violence victims.

—

I understand and share the desire to punish the self-aggrandizing, contemptible Fauci and other Scamdemic principals. Fauci deserves to be imprisoned, not only for gain-of-function funding but also for defrauding the public via lies about “mitigation” measures and shots as well as for causing extensive real-world wreckage.

But elfin 86-year-olds don’t stand trial. Even if he were to disregard Biden’s pre-emptive pardon of Fauci—that’s a novel, anti-justice concept—Trump wouldn’t authorize DOJ to prosecute Fauci because Trump knows the media and many Americans still inexplicably like this obnoxious, faux “public health expert.” Besides, Trump wants to suppress discussion of the Covid response because he enabled the lockdowns and school closures by signing the CARES Act and later pushed the failed, injurious injections. At this stage, Trump is preoccupied by invading other nations.

Erdman’s testimony should also infuriate those who still think this virus was widely lethal. Instead of worshipping Fauci, his fans should revile him for funding research that enabled the development of this ostensibly brutal virus.

—

Those who believe The Virus was deadly should also consider how pernicious or simply wasteful all gain-of-function research is. Does gain-of-function even work? If researchers must tamper with viruses to make them lethal, why should we fear natural viruses? And as natural viruses aren’t mass killers, why should we live in a state of constant “Pandemic Preparedness,” especially in the modern era of adequate dietary protein, sanitation, antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medications?

In addition to seeing the folly of gain-of-function, Americans should question the value of the Biosecurity Complex and medical research, generally. By so doing, they should see what a racket these are in a nation in which the vast majority of people suffer and die from old age, conduct-based diseases or accidents. The human health return on medical research and the Biosecurity apparatus funding is very low.

But because the media didn’t report last week’s lab leak cover-up story, most people will blissfully and naively continue to worship lying bureaucrats who lavishly fund or carry out these low-value enterprises. Doing so falsely convinces themselves that they’re sophisticated and kind.

In September, 1987, I visited the northwest of Ireland with my wife, Ellen, whose father was raised with five siblings in a thatched roof farmhouse in County Mayo. Four other siblings died in infancy. Ellen still had multiple cousins, an aunt and two uncles there.

For three days, we stayed in Ellen’s Aunt Anne’s modest stone rowhouse at the western edge of Ballina, a town of 10,000. Northwest Ireland looked and felt very different from the places I had lived. Unlike the Northeastern US, with its megalopolis belt of heavily-trafficked, cheek-to-jowl municipalities, Northwestern Ireland’s towns were each separated by ten or more miles of scarcely inhabited, treeless, rolling hills. These towns had many fewer cars and buses and no trains, factories or modern buildings. The quiet there was palpable, especially because Anne’s was the next-to-most-western home in a municipality with zero sprawl. Beyond the sidewalk outside her front door was another mile of land and then, the Atlantic Ocean.

Anne, then in her seventies, was a retired schoolteacher who never married. During our visit, Anne’s brother, i.e., Ellen’s Uncle Willie, a life-long bachelor, still lived on the century-plus-old family farmstead four miles southwest of town. Each day, whether the Yanks were in town or not, Willie rode his clunky old bicycle to share lunch with Anne. When we saw him come up the road, he pedaled so slowly it was surprising he could keep the bike from tipping over sideways.

While Ellen prepared food in the kitchen with Anne, Willie and I chatted at the lunch table adjoining the front window. Despite our different accents and idioms, the fifty-five years between us and the very different settings and cultures in which we had lived, we sustained nice enough conversations.

On the first day, when I asked Willie about his farm, he said, “Well, I used to keep cows, pigs, chickens and goats.”

He added, “But now I just keep chickens and goats.”

I asked him why he didn’t still keep cows and pigs. He paused, smiled faintly and explained in his thick brogue, “Well, I am 84 years old.”

After each of the three daily lunches we shared, Anne sprinkled Willie with holy water before he left the house. We went outside, waved goodbye and watched him pedal slowly over the horizon.

On his ride back to the farm, Willie might have wondered if all Americans asked stupid questions.

—

Anne’s home lacked heat, except for the peat fire in her hearth. Each night, Anne cooked us salmon that had just been running in the River Moy that flowed through her town. As What’s App didn’t then exist, Ellen had never spoken to Anne before our visit. Thus, we didn’t run out of things to discuss. But other than focusing on their shared family, I only remember that Anne described one of her townspeople as “house proud.” I had never heard that characterization in the US. In the US, people would have said that Anne’s house “needed updating.” But I liked her ascetic sensibility. And Irish teachers’ salaries or pensions were far below those in the US.

After dinner, Anne turned on her black-and-white TV to watch the 7 PM news on the national TV station, RTE-1. The program didn’t, as in the US, begin with dramatic staccato violins, martial drumbeats or blaring trumpets. Nor did the anchorman ominously “tease” top stories.

Instead of reciting from a teleprompter, a solitary, dark-suit-wearing man impassively read a series of short news stories from a stack of 8.5 x 11-inch papers he held in his hands. Little video footage and no correspondents were shown, though one night we saw ten seconds of a funeral procession for someone killed in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. I also remember an account of some inter-tribal violence in some African country that US news shows wouldn’t cover. And a similarly not-played-in-Peoria report that the reggae singer, Peter Tosh, had been shot to death in Jamaica by a home invader. The staid anchorman noted in passing that Mr. Tosh was known as “The Prime Minister of Weed.”

Unlike most of the Irish citizens we met, Irish news was terse and delivered in a somber tone. There was no flash or dash, no commentary, no commercials and no obvious political bias, though, as a twenty-nine-year-old visitor, I may have failed to apprehend some subtleties.

If, as in the US, a local news show preceded the national and world news, Anne didn’t watch it. Given the region’s sparse population and sleepiness, I wondered what stories the local news might have presented.

The national and world news lasted 17 minutes. It ended by showing an analog clock with the little hand on the 7 and the big hand just below the 3. Each night, Anne shut off the TV seconds after the program ended.

Thereafter, a stark silence re-emerged. We drank tea and talked until bedtime, two hours later. Shortly before bedtime, Anne put two hearth-heated hot water bottles between the sheets of the single bed in which Ellen and I slept. Given the chilly, damp weather, we appreciated the extra increment of warmth and hospitality.

—

While I enjoyed rural Ireland’s landscape and slow pace, I don’t mean to romanticize it. Ellen’s father and her mother’s father and eight million other Irish left The Emerald Isle to find work and have enough food to eat. During our visit, in every town of any size, many individuals stood on sidewalks and asked for spare change. And Irish weather is often “desperate.”

Given the foregoing, it’s understandable that the Irish are prone to depression. There’s such a thing as too much silence. Greatly exaggerating the lethality of a virus as an excuse to lock down people who already dealt with excessive isolation was an especially bad idea there. How one fills silence matters. In part to deal with loneliness, the Irish drink a lot.

I’m not proud to say I was a participant-observer in such drunkenness on the weeknight before I flew home after Ellen, who had a few more days off from work than I did, had already gone to spend a few days in Dublin. While in uniquely rundown Limerick, I went to a local pub named The Holy Ground to eat a simple dinner washed down with a pint of Guinness.

As I did, Anthony, a jovial, dark-haired man a little shorter and few years younger than I, walked in and sat down next to me. He requested the bartender to pour him his own pint and put it on his tab. The bartender needed some convincing but gave in.

Anthony initiated what the Irish call “the craic,” i.e., yakking with me, and soon turned our session into a competition. I wasn’t much of a drinker but somehow it seemed appropriate to go to extremes in that time and place.

Four pints later, my new drinking buddy and tour guide enthused about the adjacent cemetery and repeatedly exclaimed, “There’s skeletons in there, can you believe it?!” With both our judgments impaired, Anthony insisted that we go out into the evening gloom and see the place for which the pub was named. He opened one of the many previously-vandalized crypts, revealing disjointed bones. We went back inside and resumed our substance abuse. I lost count.

An hour later, my unofficial tour guide exhorted me to walk over to see “the doggies” racing in the dark at the nearby track. As we had arrived late, the grandstand was already packed with enthusiastic bettors. The races were brief and frantic. As Anthony carried no cash, I funded our wagers. We lost every remaining race. Each time we did, Anthony laughed and howled “get langers!” or proclaimed what a “wanker” I was. I didn’t know what either expression meant. Oddly though, at night’s end, Anthony won the door prize: an all-expenses paid weekend trip for two to an “international football match” in London a month later.

Thereafter, Anthony insisted that we go to another pub, where we downed a few more pints and shot pool till the wee hours. At one point, he danced, holding his cue stick, around the table while the juke box boomed the then-current Paul Simon song, You Can Call Me Al. Anthony told me he’d been “on the dry” for two months before that night.

The night ended with a short car ride back to Anthony’s public housing flat, where his sane, sober brother, whom I met at the second pub, both wrestled and steadied Anthony as he stumbled up the open-air stairways, resisting being put to bed well after midnight. When Anthony reached the third-floor balcony, he shouted to me a profane, slurred, neighbor-waking farewell.

After Anthony’s brother and his girlfriend took me back to my lodging, I soon switched off the lights and climbed into a spinning bed.

That December, I received from Anthony an Air-Mailed Christmas card with a color photo of Limerick’s Cathedral with and a big “Greetings from Limerick” message on its front and a long, boisterous, nostalgic, blue ball-point ink message inside. I may still have that card in a trunk in my basement.

—

I don’t know how the Irish present news now. But I was struck by how little time Anne spent consuming news and how irrelevant stories from other parts of her country and distant places seemed in her remote corner of the world.

Just as that night with Anthony—or rather, the way I felt next day—made me self-pledge to never again drink nearly as much in one night, seeing the austere Irish news has lastingly made me question, and sharply reduce, how much news I consume.

While many people consider news-watching educational, when I see a news story, I ask myself what I’ve learned from it. The answer is nearly always nothing of value. The news is more likely to mislead or inflame than inform.

I’ve imagined a world with no news shows; one in which people’s minds were where their feet were and they noticed only the changes in the places they inhabited and that they would disregard the most recent iterations of such time-worn themes as natural disasters, political horseraces, Mideast violence, criminal trials, and celebrity scandals or deaths.

During my legal career, some of my cases got on TV or in newspapers. The reporters sometimes misstated or omitted important facts. Thus, aside from doubting how true various news accounts are, I always wonder which parts of any story have been conveniently left out and if there are other stories, typically involving trends, not events, that might, if presented without bias, be more interesting and important.

For example, the news could do nightly stories about government or corporate corruption or individuals’ grand theft of public money. But researching these stories would require real work. It’s much cheaper and easier to go to the site of a storm, a press conference or a courthouse. Or to do a Zoom call with a dubious “expert” like Birx, Fauci, Gates or a WHO official. The news is a business. Meetin a daily deadline is far more important than doing serious journalism. Moreover, news outlets have political agendas. Truth is secondary to them.

Ted Turner, the father of 24-hour news, died last week. Non-stop news was a terrible idea, for which he should be vilified, not praised. For the past three decades. the Internet has multiplied 24-hour news sources. People constantly check their newsfeeds in fear of missing the latest headlines. Without doing serious investigation, there’s not enough news in the world to justify ‘round-the-clock coverage.

—

Addiction is clinically defined as habitual or compulsive behavior that causes adverse consequences. News-watching and alcohol consumption can both fit that description. Many people are inexorably drawn to ostensible news as alcoholics are to beer and gnats to streetlights.

Consuming too much news or consuming too much alcohol each damage mental health. News images and alcohol or other drugs are used to sway human perception and emotion. Peer pressure also drives much news and substance abuse. As I showed in Limerick, it’s easier to go along with others than to say “No.”

Though saying “No” often turns out better.

—

As I saw from the beginning how alarmist, propagandistic and biologically untenable the coronavirus news coverage was, I was especially news-averse during the Scamdemic. The death and case tickers, the spiky graphs, the morgue trucks, the guys keeling over in the streets, et al. struck me as implausible and as trying way too hard to incite fear.

As they nearly always had the TV on, I saw TV news snippets while visiting my parents and heard them and others express ideas that plainly weren’t true. I asked them where they heard such things. They told me, self-assuredly, “It was on the news!”

If, during Coronamania, people had considered only the people they knew, no one would have believed that a virus was causing mass-scale, premature deaths among non-old, non-sick people. Because it wasn’t. Throughout the past six years, when I asked others, no one could name a non-old, non-sick person they knew said to have been killed by The Deadly Virus. None of the Covophobic had any inkling that the old and sick were iatrogenically killed in the hospitals, while officials attributed these deaths to Covid.

In contrast, I, and likely many others, know over a dozen people who have died “of other causes” after taking the Covid shots. As I’ve seen so little news, I don’t know if the media has spoken ill of the jabs. I doubt it, because doing so would undermine the Scamdemic’s overarching, pro-Med/Pharma narrative and thus alienate their main sponsors.

Seeing even small bits of the contemptible Covid coverage angered me. Based on its Covid propaganda and its refusal to ask obvious questions or cover anti-Coronamania voices, the news industry deserves to die. I’m doing my part by eschewing legacy media. If a story is big enough, I won’t have to look for it. It will find me. I use the time saved by avoiding the news to talk to other people, listen to or play music, exercise, grow and make food and pray, et al.

I sometimes read Substacks or X accounts of people I trust. And I briefly scan the hype-heavy headlines to see what’s passed off as worthy of attention. But I don’t read the underlying stories about, e.g., a hantavirus said to have caused a handful of recent deaths.

Some say the hanta story is an attempt to grease the skids for the next viral crisis and vaccine. Maybe. But to me, the hanta focus feels more like a rearguard attempt to reinforce the narrative that lethal viruses are always lurking and thus, to retroactively justify the Covid response. The ludicrous, but still widely held, notion is that in 2020, the world spontaneously got smacked by the worst virus ever and that many more people would have died if we didn’t lock down, mask, test and mass-inject. The hanta message is that “it’s not nearly as bad as Covid.”

Nor was Covid nearly as bad as Covid. Mass virally-induced death is a myth. Without the news industry’s relentless support, Coronamania couldn’t have been sold to a gullible, news-addicted populace. By pushing hantavirus, monkeypox, avian flu, et al., Public Health “experts,” university researchers and Pharma execs, many of whom made millions promoting Coronamania, seek to cover their Scamdemic tracks, justify their existence and continue stealing multiple billions from the public.

A few Sunday nights ago, during the final session of the season, I was skating in my heavily-used CCM 652 Super Tacks hockey skates on the excellent ice at my county’s outdoor rink as the sun set in the southwestern sky behind an artificial lake and tall, skeletal oaks and maples. By Central New Jersey standards, it was a beautiful setting.

Shortly after nightfall, a tall rink monitor in his late twenties wearing a hooded sweatshirt skated up to me and asked me where and when I got my skates. I told him I bought them, used, on ebay fifteen years ago for forty bucks and that I had two more secondary-market pairs like them at home. It’s good to have sharpened skates in reserve when cold snaps come and lake or canal ice forms. One must not miss these rare opportunities.

He said, “Man, those look like they’ve been through the war! You skate good. You should get some decent skates.”

I told him I had thought about doing so but went to a hockey store and they were selling skates that cost $1,200. I said, “If I spend $1,200 on a pair of skates and blow my knee out, I’ll be really bummed.”

He told me I could get very good, though not top-of-the-line, skates for $400. As we circled, he looked me in the eye and said, “Dude, you’ve been working your whole life. What are you saving money for? This is the time to spend it.”

I appreciated the sentiment and his concern for my happiness. And I found both his indirect comment about my age and the depth of his conviction about my need for new skates kind of funny.

But I’m happy enough with my old skates, which—I just looked it up—were made between 1993 and 2000, because they fit well—I skate without socks—and I don’t have to break in new ones. Besides, buying new skates would seem like the age-inappropriate equivalent of buying a new Corvette.

As we circled the ice five times, side-by-side, he twice repeated his you-only-live-once theme, using different words each time: Dude, get new skates. You won’t be doing this forever. You can’t take your money with you.

—

On my fifteen-minute drive home, his point about life’s finitude resonated. But only as it pertained to the life span generally, not to replacing my skates. I thought of family members and peers who have passed away and the others who are struggling with health challenges. For decades, I’ve said, “Life is short. Vital life is shorter still.”

During Coronamania, I repeatedly noted that some deaths of those over 75, as were the vast majority of ostensible Covid victims, were to be expected.

In most ways, I live accordingly. Life’s brevity was always the central reason I opposed the lockdowns and school closures. All of us need to do stuff we like for as long as we can. I hated the idea of hiding from other people. It was theatrical, stupid and destructive. Doing so saved no one’s life.

I especially hated the Coronamanic closures’ effects on those younger than I am. The Scamdemicians stole from the young opportunities to do the fun, life-shaping, memory-building activities I did at their ages.

During the lockdowns, closures and mask and vaxx mandates, it bothered me that the young didn’t more vigorously and transgressively defend and pursue the things of youth. 2020-22 should have provoked the most forceful rejection of the authority ever. What happened to “You gotta fight! For your right! To parrrrty!”

The youth of 2020-22 failed epically. And/or their parents failed them.

—

I didn’t like being DEI-ousted in December 2024 from the community gardens I used to coordinate.

When I was hired ten years ago to manage that two-plus-acres site, my boss—who left a year later—told me to “think of the space as your playground.” I loved hearing that. I built three chicken coops and runs that housed twenty, egg-laying chickens that, when they weren’t roaming freely, were chased by neighborhood kids and adults. I and those I oversaw also teamed to built large hoophouses and dozens of extra garden boxes and planted many perennial flowers and permaculture plants, including dozens of raspberry and blueberry bushes, fig and nut trees and grapevines. I also displayed over a dozen large, whimsical and/or colorful plywood paintings I and students created in the greenhouse on cold, sunny January and February mornings while big speakers played a variety of pleasing music. I built many relationships while working there. Playgrounds are good for that.

Last night, I returned to the gardens to show these to an old friend who wanted to see what the site looked like. Nearly all that I and others had created and planted has been remove, as if to remove any trace that I had been there. My heart sank at the place’s newfound, hideous sterility. No fun or beauty allowed.

The new womyn in Rutgers management who got rid of me after I hadn’t missed a shift in nine seasons erased any trace of my work. These same individuals fervently supported Covid-closing the university and, later, on-line classes and mandatory injections. Colleges have put in charge those with the worst judgment and the most bias.

—

But on the bright side, losing my garden job means I uncharacteristically have some free time in the summer. Thus, in the rink monitor’s YOLO spirit, I’m thinking of renting a car and moving about the Northeastern and near-Central US over the next few months. Before I take any trips, I’d like to know how many of you might like to meet in-person.

I’ve met with multiple dozens of readers and spoken on the phone to many dozens more. I’ve nearly always have enjoyed doing so. Those who read these posts tend to be personable critical thinkers who have led interesting lives. I’ve learned much from them/you. Given the anger the Scamdemic built in me, it’s been uplifting to gather with sane people. Essential, really.

More specifically, I may go to the Washington, DC area in early June. And to New England in early July. I also have family in Central and Western Pennsylvania that I visit in August. I could extend the latter trip into places/states not so far to the west.

Whether I go take, or extend, these trips depends in part on who I might meet there. If you’re interested in sharing a meal or a walk in these regions, please email me at forecheck32 at g mail. Let’s see if we can find times and places that make sense for both of us.

If I end up not traveling this summer, I can use the money I save to buy new skates.

Nah, I’ll use my old 652s until they carry me off on my shield.