jorb wrote:I claimed that it was being used as an expediency to advance government power, and I called the attention given to it a misdirection....
Do not take me for some conjurer of simple tricks, Bilbo Baggins. I am not trying to rob you.
Sadly, if history proves anything, it proves that most people do not learn from history.
If they did, they would not let themselves be hoodwinked. The coronavirus is real enough, and statistically it is the third deadliest cause of death in the United States. Nevertheless, it is still only 0.6%, almost always with comorbidities. There is no justification at all for the panic some people have.
I've more or less continued to live a normal life here in Omaha since March 2020. It's an urban space. Some restrictions took effect for a short time and some parts of the state, where the meat packing plants are in the far northeast, had an outbreak. Many of my friends got the virus, and then later got the vaccine. They were fine in both cases, as most of them are healthy and not octogenarians; even those who were either had no effect from the virus, got the vaccine, or never caught it.
We practically didn't shut down. We had a mask mandate from August to I think about Easter, much less than a year. We had quotas for a few months early on in my city. We've been fine.
I sadly agree that, real though the virus is, it is really showing who actually does research and who takes government and media as Gospel truth. As much as the backwards peasants from a millennium ago such people sneer at. Again, we don't learn from history. We just repeat it.