TRUSTING OUR OWN EYES

Yesterday, I visited my widowered 95-year-old father, who lives an hour north of me. When I arrived, the TV news loop was, as always, on. Loud. Physically isolated people are driven to watch the news. They feel that someone is speaking to them.

In addition to enabling news watchers to feel socially connected, watchers think that consuming the news helps them to understand the world and confers sophistication.

I gave up the latter perception years ago. The news routinely, purposefully distorts many stories and studiously omits others. Consuming news makes people believe many things that aren’t true. It also causes them to misgauge that which exerts strong influence over their lives cf. that which does not.

“Journalists” sensationalistically report stories that draw eyes. They portray catastrophes and, when it fits their sociopolitical agenda, they cover violence; if it bleeds, it leads. Covid coverage was rendered like a Sam Peckinpah movie.

Assignment editors also tend to select stories that are logistically easy to cover. Reporters attend scheduled briefings or press conferences, in which pre-packaged lies are told and, as during Coronamania, deliberately fail to ask the liars obvious questions. Going to government buildings, recording, editing and broadcasting/publishing is much easier than independently investigating or researching. Further, public relations firms feed the news industry much misleading, self-serving information that is easily converted into news.

The media of the past few decades conveys a distinctly PC narrative. It declines to present an array of non-PC stories. And it tells stories in ways that disguise inconvenient truths.

In the Internet/Attention Deficit Disorder Era, people scan headlines and often skip the underlying stories; ain’t nobody got time for that. Headlines often mislead readers regarding what really happened and/or don’t reflect the accompanying article.

Newswriters and/or their editors sometimes unintentionally get stuff wrong. During my legal career, I handled some publicized cases that newspaper or TV accounts mischaracterized. In fairness to newspeople, some fact patterns and issues are complicated; unless you’ve immersed in a matter for months or years, it can be hard to understand, distill or explain what has occurred and what will likely ensue, especially if the reporter has tight deadlines or space or time limitations.

But whether media mischaracterizations are, as usual, intentional or simply accidental, news readers and viewers mistakenly take news portrayals as gospel.

Because the news is at least as likely to mislead as it is to enlighten, and because my life is often unaffected by what the media portrays, I seldom consume news. When I saw/heard some media coverage during the Scamdemic’s first week, the fearmongering was off the charts. To manage my anger, I eschewed the PC news outlets’ Coronavirus alarmism and misrepresentation. But enough snippets slipped through for me to see/hear that the lies continued throughout.

In mid-March, 2020, I began writing about what a poor idea locking down was. Initially, I wrote to newspapers’ op-ed pages. They wouldn’t publish my views. Then, I posted on Medium until they de-platformed me for telling the truth about the shots.

By mid-2021, I found, and began posting on, Substack. Finding writers—and readers—who perceived the Scamdemic boosted my spirits. Substack commenters made observations and asked questions that the ostensibly inquisitive and well-informed, but bought and biased, “journalists” didn’t. I also found The Epoch Times and The Wall Street Journal presenting a reasonable, fact-based counter-narrative. But by then, most of the “mitigation’s” damage had already occurred. And those who wrote about the Covid overreaction still had a much smaller audience than did the fearmongers.

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Consuming news, as currently constituted, is a pernicious addiction. The important stuff manifests itself in directly observable ways. The truth tends to find you.

Social engineers now promote “fifteen-minute cities.” Because my workplace is 2.5 miles from my house, I spend most of my waking hours within a similarly small radius. In that sphere, what I see with my own eyes or hear from people I trust provides a truer picture of the world than the news provides.

As it pertains to the media-driven Corona terror campaign:

First and foremost, despite all of the deeply phony Covid case counts and death tolls—predicated on the wildly unreliable 40 cycle PCR tests and CARES Act incentives to miscode the cause of deaths—Covid didn’t, as the media or hospitals suggested, kill extravagantly or indiscriminately. After 42 months, even though I live in New Jersey, which had America’s highest ostensible Covid death rate, and I’ve known thousands of people here, I still directly know no one who died of the virus. I’ve heard of eight people in New Jersey or nearby parts of New York—known by people I know but not by me—whom the virus was said to have killed. All were very old and/or very sick to begin with. Many others have data sets that resemble mine; I know, because I’ve asked dozens of people who they knew who died from Covid.

The limited risk profile of the virus was clearly known in March, 2020, Hence, I never feared the virus, not even from Day 1. During the ensuing 42 months, I never saw anything in my daily life to change my initial impression. The CDC and Pharma sold the lie that the virus threatened everyone. It clearly did not.

I live near two hospitals. I never saw nor heard of lines outside either one. Though I did see some thoroughly-practiced nurse dance videos.

Despite all of the goofy and oppressive “mitigation” measures, and even accepting, for purposes of discussion, that the case and death stats were close to accurate, there were no nations, states or municipalities where infected corpses were piled like cordwood, or where legions of healthy people died. The most restricted states did worse than did the less restricted.

In 2020, some asked, “Why don’t the Amish get Covid?” Answer: “Because they don’t watch TV.” Working together with government, the media created Coronamania. If your TV hadn’t told you to be afraid, your observable world wouldn’t have, either.

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It was obvious—at least to some—that shutting down a society and an economy would hurt far more people than a virus ever could. As the Scamdemic unfolded, I directly observed the following consequences of Coronamania:

My three adult kids’ lives were badly, lastingly damaged. During a life phase when he should have been working with face-to-face with others, my son looked for a job for ten hours/day, seven days/week for nine months. Like one of his sisters, who worked solely on-line, he returned to his childhood home because he lacked rent money.

My other daughter taught high school on-line, at least for her urban students who logged on. These students fell further behind. Many dropped out permanently. Teachers tell me that many students who returned are listless and undisciplined and are underperforming. When they closed schools for 18 months, what did they expect?

I knew that my adult “kids,” and my daughter’s students’ experiences must resemble tens of millions of other Americans who had pivotal time stolen from them in what should have been the primes of their lives. My son still works alongside other human beings only one day/week. My old law office peers only work in-person three days/week and everyone is free to pick any three days they want. Many important friendships will fail to materialize in this New, socially dysfunctional, work-from-home Normal. Lacking foot traffic, the cities in which people used to work have also declined.

The things I buy: grocery store and restaurant food, clothes and shoes, all cost about 20% more than when the Scamdemic took hold. In the dollar stores near me, the new presumptive price is $1.25. Federal and local taxes have also increased. Inflation happens when a government puts $10 trillion contrived dollars into circulation.

I see multiple vacant storefronts in my downtown and in malls. Concurrently, I see many Amazon and FedEx trucks delivering to houses in my neighborhood. Sustaining a small business was already hard, pre-Scamdemic. It became much harder during.

Conspicuously, there are no For Sale signs on my block or for many blocks in every direction. Very few people are selling their homes. Each week, I get postcards or letters from real estate flippers seeking to buy my house. With the Fed trying to quell Covid inflation, banks now advertise 7.5% mortgages, a multi-fold increase since 2020. Thus, many buyers are priced out of the market and many sellers are disincentivized to sell and swap a 2.5% mortgage for another one three times higher. You’ll see more ripple effects arising from tighter credit and residential stasis.

Relatedly, on my block of twenty-two middle-income houses, there is now only one kid under 18. People who bought these houses decades ago are staying put. More than half of those living on my block have laptop jobs or are Boomer retirees “aging in place.” These “progressive” neighbors fearfully and self-interestedly supported the lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and shots. They were oblivious, or indifferent, to the harm that mitigation mania was doing to the young. My neighbors had passive income and didn’t have much remaining energy for social life.

I received no wedding invitations during the Scamdemic. People postponed marriage. And because they weren’t dealing face-to-face with others, many fewer met people to marry. Among the people I know in their twenties and thirties, few are married or in relationships that are moving toward marriage.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are on clearer display than before. Every day, I see people panhandling at traffic lights and on sidewalks and drinking, using various drugs, hanging out, or sleeping in parks. Tons of herb are used in public spaces and in passing cars. Overall, people are driving worse than ever around here. In addition to numerous close calls, I was recently sideswiped by another driver going 65 mph on an uncrowded highway; likely high and/or on his phone.

Over the past three-and-a-half years, midnight drag racing has become common on the highway audible from my open window. It sounds like fun. But it’s kind of dangerous to other drivers out at that hour. The police seem to tolerate it. I’m seeing stuff stolen from where I work and from the mail. People sense that various laws aren’t being enforced and they’re acting out. On the heels of authoritarian order, a new form of disorder seems to have emerged.

I see many overweight individuals. While excessive weight was also visible pre-Scamdemic, it seems more prevalent now. Few people seem to have taken seriously that overweight increased the prospect of viral death. While the obese disproportionately died from the virus, the vast majority of the overweight survived.

Anecdotally, vaxx injury seems real. I’ve seen some oddly-timed deaths and various injuries, including auto-immune disorders, among vaxxed people I know.

Moreover, nearly all of the injected people I know have “gotten Covid” since injecting. Some of them have fallen ill more than once; this, after all those angry assertions about how the shots and masks would “Stop the Spread!” My wife and I, both uninjected and unmasked, haven’t ever caught “the ‘Ro.” Weird, right?

Does the nightly news say anything bad about the shots? I’d be surprised. Most of the ads on my father’s TV are for Pharma products. Thus, the news won’t report that various drugs or shots don’t work or harm people. Americans spent $634 billion on pharmaceuticals in 2022. In comparison, they spent $2.3 trillion on groceries. Americans spend more than one-fourth as much on meds as they do on food—or what passes as food—itself. Though the consumption of many grocery store products builds demand for Pharma products.

I’ve lost interest in numerous relationships with people who said “Let’s get together when this whole thing is over” or insisted that I take a shot I didn’t need. I lost respect for those who denigrated me for opposing the lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests, jabs and Covid giveaways. I know that many others have also ended long-term relationships for the same reasons. Did the news cover this?

Over the past 42 months, life has changed. I didn’t need to watch the news or read the paper or Net news to see this.

Yet, more recently, I sometimes see Net news headlines belatedly addressing the lockdowns’ predictable bad effects. This is hard to swallow: the media masters whipped up the fear that caused most people to fervently support the disruption that caused such harm. But they had their agenda, They didn’t care who they hurt.

I almost forgot one other noticeable Coronamania effect: many peoples’ ears seem to stick out more than they used so. Must be the elastic on those masks that they wore for so long.