PHOTOS, LIES AND CORONAMANIA

This post is rated PG-13 for crude anatomical references.

Having played high school sports, I know that baseball, basketball and football teams use multiple balls for regular practices or to practice before games begin. These balls are aggregated and carried in large, typically zippered bags called “ballbags.”

Though males—especially adolescents—love double entendre, I never heard any player or coach call a ballbag a “ballsack.” Had I heard this scrotal allusion, I would have known that the speaker was joking, just as I would while reading guestbook entries of those who had scribbled names like Jim Nasium, I.P. Freeley or Ali Tabugor. Put-on and irreverence are central elements of person-to-person male comedy.

I recently read about a sports fan website named Ballsack Sports. Ballsack often posts fake, controversial stories about, and fake quotes from, famous athletes. Credulous TV sports pundits have argued fervently about the substance of these stories or quotes, as if the underlying story was true or the underlying statement had really been made. It’s very funny to see highly-paid “experts” worked up about some fabricated story or quote. The joke’s on them and they don’t know it.

Your source is Ballsack Sports? Seriously?

The site's vulgar name and the outlandishness/whimsicality of the stories or quotes presented therein should--but somehow don’t always--signal readers that many of these stories are fake. Though, for partial deceptive effect, Ballsack places its fake stories alongside plainly true stories, such as the scores of yesterday’s games.

People are suckers for superficial but intrinsically worthless indicia of credibility. As Ballsack’s founder has unapologetically pointed out, anyone can post someone’s photo alongside some official-looking logo and put a statement in quotation marks. This visual makes the quote seem genuine even though, if one considers the substance of the statement, it’s distinctly implausible. Form prevails over substance.

In response to criticism, Ballsack’s founder has explained that, by running fake stories, he's making a larger epistemological point: just because the manner of presentation of a story suggests authenticity doesn’t mean that people have the right (his word) to believe what they read. Without quoting—or perhaps even knowing of—St. Thomas Aquinas, the Ballsack founder is expressing the currently undersubscribed—but hardly radical—notion that people shouldn’t take what they hear or read at face value. Instead, people should directly observe the world around them, apply knowledge and logic, and decide if what other people, or the government or media, are saying makes sense.

The last three years have shown this as clearly as it can be shown.

Though people stood behind logo-ed podiums, had executive titles and used many stats and graphs, there were, from the outset, many indicia that the Unholy Trinity of Government/Media/Pharma was badly distorting the Corona narrative. The media never asked obvious questions including, but not limited to, the following:

Weren’t most of those said to have died of Covid already very old or sick? If hospitals were being overrun, why were they receiving hundreds of billions in subsidies? Will a virus vanish into the ether if some people stay home? If masks block viruses, why were lockdowns necessary and why should people stay six feet apart? Why should kids be kept home when none were dying and hardly any were getting sick or transmitting this virus to others? Why should anyone rely upon case and death statistics derived from wildly unreliable 40 cycle PCR tests? Why lock down healthy people, during an election year, when this had never been done before?

Though it’s their job to tell both sides of a story, no one in the mainstream media questioned Covid statistics, assertions or public policies that simply didn’t add up. Recently disclosed tweets and e-mails show that the media’s conspicuous failure to engage the Covid dictators wasn’t caused by undue deference, laziness or naivete. Rather, government officials and the media actively suppressed dissent or inquiry. Instead of being journalists and exposing lies, the media aggressively sold lies.

Aside from the government/media’s malfeasance, everyday people didn’t ask their own questions that would have revealed the scam right under their noses. For example: Doesn’t that video of the Chinese guy lying on his back on the sidewalk scissoring his legs seem hokey? If hospitals are overrun, why are there no lines outside the hospitals near me? Out of all the people they knew, directly or indirectly, did they know of anyone said to have died of Covid? If so, how old and sick was the decedent, pre-infection? If the vaxxes were safe and effective, why have millions of vaxxed people gotten sick or died? Etc.

The scam has been so obvious that it has often felt to me as if the government and media were mocking the masses. When I tried to point out to the Coronaphobic the very high Covid survival rates, the holes in the “mitigation” strategies and the broad, deep human costs of these measures, people angrily told me I wasn’t an expert like the public health bureaucrats, politicians or TV anchors. Some literally put their hands up to block my words. Doing so was the conversational equivalent of a Plexiglass barrier. It worked just about as well.

If you’ve been around the block even a few times, you know that many people don’t tell the truth. You probably grew up with kids, as I did, who repeatedly lied or exaggerated. Spanning decades, you’ve seen a wide array of ads for purportedly, but not actually, excellent products. While litigating for thirty years, I questioned many witnesses who were obviously lying. Some of these people were “experts” or high-ranking government officials.

Additionally, before 2020, I had taken and read much science. I knew enough to place what I was hearing about some not-so “novel” virus within a framework that made it unscary. I knew that the Government/Media/Pharma Complex was lying and opportunistically overreacting; playing people for political power and profit.

Other people—some of them highly-credentialed—also saw this. The mass market media gave them almost zero air-time or column space.

But in reaction to the media’s Coronavirus terror campaign, most panicked. For decades, Americans have looked back on Orson Welles’s 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and mocked those who bugged out and thought Martians were invading New Jersey. Now, many of those mockers should look in the mirror and admit that, during Coronamania, they unquestioningly, naively bought into the latter-day, government/media-induced hysteria and supported an extreme, widespread, enduring, ruinous overreaction.

Most people can only process the surface of a story. They look at a headline, see a government job title or a gamed graph or a scary image and believe the narrative. Instead of taking the opposite tack and doubting a thoroughly agenda-driven media, they ascribe extra credibility to that which they see on a screen. Those who think that Government/Media/Pharma tells the truth are badly, sadly mistaken. Biden, Birx, Fauci and TV newspeople have routinely told major lies throughout the past three years. Politically-aligned commentators have continually averted their eyes.

Access to a TV camera, a printing press or a podium, or some university-based credential doesn’t confer veracity. To the contrary, all of these government and media messengers and institutions have, during Coronamania, shown themselves to be far less honest than used car salesmen. Consider, for example, how colleges—the supposed bastions of “Science” and critical thought—still require 18-22 year-olds to submit to injections that never made sense for them and have clearly been shown to be ineffective and seriously damaging.

The lies continue. Despite abundant data and observable outcomes among people we know revealing abject vaxx failure, a recently-publicized model—not a study—concluded that the shots kept 18 million people out of the hospital and saved 3 million lives. This model, like others before it, is built on self-serving assumptions and inputs that yield the desired, false result. As throughout the past three years, this pro-vaxx lie is being repeated in headlines that most people will believe and cite as gospel.  

BTW, y’know what kept unvaxxed me out of the hospital and alive during the last three years? The rabbit’s foot I keep in my right pocket. Prove me wrong. Well, that talisman plus not being over 80 years old or 60 pounds overweight.

There’s always one more Covid lie to which to retreat and one more false headline or inflammatory image to publish. But by now, the politicians, bureaucrats and news media who drove the scam and the Coronaphobic/Vaxxophilic rank-and-file who fell for it should be deeply ashamed about all of the suffering they’ve caused. Instead, they hold onto the Covid and vaxx lies like a dog holds a bone in its teeth. Because Government/Media/Pharma won’t ever admit that they’ve run a massive scam. And the egos of the gullible everyman and everywoman preclude them from admitting that they’ve been played.