Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
[Note : Thanks to Dave GinOly for inspiring this piece. His recent comment perfectly echoed much of my current thinking]
As predicted by many, the “we always thought lockdowns were bad”, or “the vaccines were never about stopping infection/transmission” brigade, have been much in evidence. We’ve also had the “we just didn’t know at the time and did the best we could” defence - coupled most famously with calls for a Pandemic Amnesty.
Some people seem to have the memory of a, you know the err, the thing, . . . orange, lives in water.
As I look at the Twit-posting of yet another ‘doctor’ who proudly proclaims he’s ‘relaxing’ a bit now and going unmasked in select places - but will still only have get-togethers with vaccinated people, it’s hard not to let the Underpants of Despair give you one almighty wedgie.
Those of us who don’t have the memory of one of those, uhh, orange things, will remember a time when the purpose of getting a vaccine was to allow you to walk through the valley of the shadow of death - and fear no evil. It seems like ancient history now, though.
That’s how they were sold to us - at least in the golden age of sanity known as the pre-covid era (Pre-CE).
Nowhere did our doctors and health bodies ever say to us “you’ll still get sick, just not quite as sick” if you get vaccinated.
They were either
(a) lying back then, or
(b) lying to us now
The vaccine won’t stop me getting infected?
No
The vaccine won’t stop me infecting others?
No
So why should I get vaccinated, then?
Shut up, you selfish, anti-vaxxer, science-denying moronic scum
One other thing the non-orange amongst us remember is the curious phrase “build back better”. It was curious for two reasons; one being the implicit assumption that something had been ‘destroyed’ so that re-building was necessary. The second, more interesting, curiosity was the speed and universality with which this messaging was employed.
It was almost as if they were saying “This is it, guys, this is THE pandemic we’ve been waiting for - time to throw the switch on the new way of doing things”
Build back better for a pandemic that, even back then, looked like it was only 2-3 times worse than a severe flu? And that turned out to be an over-estimate because, as it transpired, it’s much closer (overall) to the lethality of a severe flu.
Within mere weeks of the outbreak we were being fed a diet of ‘deadly’ and ‘unprecedented’ and then told we must build back better. It was SO bad, SO unprecedented, that we must completely upend the way we’ve been doing things, the way we structure our societies, and our whole response to ‘health’. Vaccines, vaccine passports, digital ID, restrictions on movements, masks, were all necessary, they said - the whole panoply of control that was going to be ‘necessary’ in order for humanity to have a chance, to re-build from the ashes of this global catastrophe, was forced upon us under the pretext of a global ‘emergency’.
Really?
And, as if by magic, our health institutions were no longer about health, but about health security. Who dreamed that one up - and why?
They, our governments and institutions, broke stuff, - tiny insignificant things like the entire world and our trust - not covid, covid didn’t do any of that - and they were basically saying “we’re going to do a whole load of stupid and unnecessary stuff that will completely bugger things up for everyone (except us). But the good news is that we’re going to build back better”
I haven’t seen too much of the BBB stuff recently - maybe they think they’re already doing that well enough that they don’t need the propaganda anymore. Or maybe they think the phrase is counter-productive now, so they’ve stopped using it - whilst still WEFFing away in their private jet jollies.
They’re already committing billions for climate reparations - all those places that have been badly damaged by the carbon emitters. Like, erm, well, you know, erm, . . . these places must exist, mustn’t they? Emotive bullshit that is as baffling as it is sickening. It will, of course, just be a virtue signalling re-packaging of standard foreign aid budgets, but the new emphasis will allow the greasy arseholes who govern us to climb a few more rungs up the ladder of self-righteous smug and to hammer home the propaganda about the ‘emergency’ status of the ‘climate’.
The playbook, these days, seems to be depressingly familiar. Take an issue - and things like racism, or covid, or excessive pollution, etc, are real issues - and amplify them beyond all recognition. You’re now living, or so we are continually told, in a world steeped past sanity with super-systemic-structural isms all over the place, where walking within 10 metres of another person will probably kill them, and where your next fart will probably cause a small village in Africa to spontaneously combust.
But have they overplayed their hand?
There are, I think, indications that they have. Take the new bivalent booster - the rapturous ROGER (Rodent Goo of Extreme Righteousness) that they want to roger everyone with.
They released this all new and improved mouse-powered bivalent Goo and very few have been interested in it. The mouse mush has not been a great success story - either from the point of view of popularity or its performance. And it is my understanding that you can’t get the mouse boost without having had the previous vaccines. So if, as a previously unvaccinated person, you want the mouse mush injected into you (for some utterly inexplicable reason), you would have to suffer through at least 2 shots of the previous Goo designed for a strain long gone, that doesn’t work at all against the new strains (and, quite possibly, never worked at all against the original or Delta strains).
Their carefully crafted fear narrative has disintegrated and lies unused and neglected like the millions of vials of this Godawful Goo that are slowly rotting away in storage.
Too many people are just not buying it any more.
It might have had a bit of an unwanted knock-on effect. Unwanted for them, at any rate. I’m seeing a lot more pushback against the climate narrative than I did before. It’s as if a lot more people are simply saying “you tried this shit with covid, too”.
There’s a lot more people awake now to the promotion of fear by our governments. They are not stupid - and they can now see exactly the same tactics employed during covid being used in an attempt to stoke up fear about the ‘climate’.
And, like the mouse mush, they’re having none of it.
People are beginning to ask all sorts of pertinent questions - things like
what exactly IS the ‘right’ temperature for the planet?
why did the world not come to an inglorious end when the climate was warmer than it is now only a few hundred years ago?
how do we know it’s carbon dioxide that’s responsible and not natural variations in the climate?
They keep trying to get us to walk through the various valleys, created with just the right amount of shadow - but we’re walking up the slopes and bathing in the sunlight.
If ‘their’ intent has been to cower us into submission, to have a frightened populace that is easily moulded to accept all sorts of extra controls and restrictions in the name of the ‘greater good’, it has seriously backfired. There are too many, now, who won’t play their stupid games any more.
This can go one of two ways - they can force us back down into the valleys - and take away our rods and staffs, or we can head up the slopes into the sunlight and begin to take back our part in the narrative (we should not be aiming for ‘control’ of the narrative - nobody has that right).
My worry is that it will be the former. They’re already taking steps to have more control over the online discourse - the control they exercised through Big Tech proved not to be sufficient for their covid message. I don’t think they will let this state of affairs continue. My prediction is that, soon, climate ‘misinformation’ will be labelled as harmful - maybe even an act of terrorism - and subject to sanction.
The evil we need to fear is not covid, or climate change, or any of the various isms and phobias that we are allegedly drowning in. The evil we need to fear is government overreach and their attempts to herd us into the valleys.
When I was in the army, the Psalm always went "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, because I'm the meanest mother fucker in the valley".
It's the best way to be, when one is in the Valley of the Shadow.
I have also experienced the scales falling from my eyes in a number of areas as you have described. My views on climate change have gone from being mostly on board but a touch sceptical in 2019, to now thinking it's all complete bullshit, and that's solely because of the blatant similarity between the Covid and climate narratives. I'm also now far more cautious in my views about other vaccines specifically, and big-pharma medications in general. If they can fuck the covid Vax up so badly, what else have they made a hash of?
In general, it's safest to think along the following lines...
If Bill Gates is involved with something, avoid it.
If the PM says it's true, it's false.
If a government agency says its safe, its dangerous.
If Parliament makes a law to "help you", it will eventually hurt you.
If the mainstream media agree on something, it's a lie.
Etc....
Y’know, I probably wouldn’t have ever questioned the phrase “zero emissions” if they hadn’t tried playing the same game with Covid. In other news, my son— a product of his time in some ways— mentioned laughingly but not mockingly the other day that cow farts are ruining the planet. “Stop right there,” I said. “I need you to explain to me exactly how that works in the context of the size of our planet, global number of cattle, and comparative flatulence by species. Moreover, given the urgency of this matter, I would like an essay on the methane gas emissions of giant pandas, a species humans go to bizarre lengths to preserve and reproduce that doesn’t (as far as I know) provide an efficient source of nutrition and clothing.” (Poor kid. He was just trying to make a fart joke, and I’m trying to turn him into the based boy version of Matilda.)