I dabble in street art. I do paintings on large pieces of plywood that I scavenge from construction-site dumpsters. I display some of these at the community gardens I manage in New Brunswick, NJ. Using long, star-bit screws to make them hard to remove, I fasten others to abandoned buildings in the city. Sometimes other males spray paint over, or find ways to dislodge, these. But some works have long remained, undamaged, where I posted them. One has been plainly visible alongside a busy intersection for five years. By now, tens of thousands of people must have seen it. Unless you’re texting while you wait at the traffic light, it’s hard to miss.
Much easier to “go along to get along” then go against the grain. Most people including my family tell me to move on and stop talking about it. For them, it is over. Just like that, they dismiss the whole Covid debacle. I just can’t forget these 2.5 years. It wears on me everyday. Maybe I need to take up yoga! Great article, Mark!
In a last ditch effort to try and wake up my brother (74 and with an IQ of 149) I mailed him RFK Jr.’s book A LETTER TO LIBERALS. I thought the passage in the book about how Galileo’s fellow scientists refused to look thru his telescope would speak to him - he’s an amateur astronomer (built his first telescope at the age of 13) and was the director of a planetarium. He returned the unread book. Told me Bobby was a charlatan and an opportunist. Said Galileo’s fellow scientists were NOT scientists. Said I was uneducated (I did not attend college) and that I am part of a cult. He said kiss me goodbye because you’ll probably never see me again - to which I did. I didn’t cry until he drove away - I think I was in shock. I am prepared for him to never wake up despite the evidence. I had been in the anger stages of grief over the loss of this once extremely close relationship. Now I am working towards the acceptance stage. And the saddest part is that his twin brother is of the exact same mindset. He lives in Hawaii - we haven’t spoken in months. The mass formation is real. I pray everyday.
Although I have been adamantly opposed to the jabs from the start (40 years in pharma-- I know how to recognize bad studies) my husband chose to believe his cardiologist and internist who highly recommended that he not only the get the initial series but also boosters. I would have liked the opportunity to ask his MD's the questions that the yoga instructor posed (no pun intended) but my husband knew I probably would embarrass them as I had with my statin questions. It is hard to make people understand that physicians may NOT know best. I believe MD's should be held liable for their recommendations as the actual data never lined up with the marketing message.
I am a primary care doctor that when asked would say “I don’t know” ,I don’t know the short medium or long side effects because time has not passed! I was and still am so baffled at how people would be so willingly be part of a medical experiment
Why would they ask me what are the side effects? I would tell them I don’t know what can happen to you in 6 months,1 year,5 years ,10 years or more -I said—nobody knows!
There’s no control group now (well there’s a silent control group )
I also made patients question .the young and healthy..your risk is very low..I don’t know the risk of this -patient’s fear was so palpable and out of proportion
Luckily I was able to help some-usually people that you would think were the “least educated” were the wisest -they didn’t want to go to the hospital or be part of the experiment (unfortunately most of them were so coherced and needed their jobs they HAD to do it )-so sad
I gave examples of other drugs being banned after years of “safe and effective” use
In reality I knew- I strongly did not recommend it
ARN getting into your cells and messing your genes/proteins? How can that be good and safe? I knew already cancers, autoimmune diseases would happen.
I didn’t allow my mom to get it
I told my husband from day 1-he was skeptical as well ,told him this will be hard to prove medically like everything else
I didn’t know I was going to see all these illnesses happen so quick
Speaking in past tense because I lost that job of 10 years
This is an uphill battle with blind people
Not sure how this will be fixed -I hope it does soon because it’s so sad to think this is the world my young daughters have to live..I try to instill critical thinking skills every day
( i say even if ALL the kids in the school do something but YOU think it’s wrong or unsafe -don’t do it! Even if you are the ONLY one!)
I asked my local state reps to share with me the scientific data they were basing their support of mask mandates on. One sent me to an NPR podcast, the other told me “as a frontline nurse of 32 years who, with many thousands of my colleagues have worn masks for long periods of time before COVID, and a professional whose career and patients have depended on understanding the hierarchy of evidence (quality) I can assure you that I am not giving in to uninformed hysteria and panic” nor am I virtue signaling.... it is clear we disagree on this”
I had sent her links to several studies showing the inefficacy of masks, to which that was her response.
I replied that “In your position of representative of the people, I would ask for more than “agree to disagree”... I would ask that you engage with the studies I sent”
She replied that “I don’t want to get into an evidence slinging contest with you, there would be no point”
This was last November. I will likely be voting republican for the first time in my life just to spite this condescending entitlement.
Aug 25, 2022·edited Aug 25, 2022Liked by Mark Oshinskie
Great piece! And I like your painting. I'm laughing because in my city, which is rapidly being run into the ground by leftist idiots, to display that message would make my dimbulb neighbors find another block to walk their dogs down. But that wouldn't bother me.
I have a lot of MD friends and for the most part they don't question what comes down from on high or if they do they're way too status conscious to squawk about it. The culture of medicine is one of hierarchical bullying and kowtowing. So many of these docs still think Fauci is "doing an outstanding job". His words.
When I was eight my brother told me there was a monster under my bed. I was scared of this monster and couldn’t sleep so my brother told me to stay under the blankets because monsters can’t penetrate blankets. When morning came and I was still alive, the eight year old me truly believed that monsters couldn’t penetrate blankets. Eventually I realized that the blanket wasn’t protecting me. There wasn’t a monster under the bed.
They told people there was a monster under the bed and so many people believed them. They also believed that the monster couldn’t penetrate their masks. They still haven’t realized that there is no monster under the bed. My eight year old self could have told them that.
The difference in cognitive style between the establishment-aligned and the dissident or, one might say, conscience-aligned, is rather stark isn't it? For the former, truth is determined socially by reference to authority pronouncement. For the latter, who said what is rather irrelevant: what matters is the structure of the argument and how well it does or does not conform to the observable world.
The result is one group inhabiting a hallucinatory hall of mirrors, which has been driven quite insane; and another, which inhabits reality.
Of course, to the authoritarians, we look quite insane. But again, the big difference is that they're not really capable of explaining why we're crazy, aside from 'you don't agree with authorities'. While we are perfectly capable of pointing out the inconsistencies in the authoritarian hyperreality, and doing so in detail.
Mark this is another of your brilliant insights from seemingly ordinary daily encounters. I expect most of your readers practically “know” both characters in the story. I feel like I do.
I have to applaud your willingness to engage where so many of us keep quiet and go about our business.
I have a good friend that's a doctor and works at the hospital. She makes fun of my healthy eating and thought it strange that vitamin A helped a skin problem I was having on my hands.
When Covid first made the news she told me it was just a disease that killed old and unhealthy people, this is no big deal, SARS was scary she said, that was killing young people. She was flying back from China before the lockdown and making fun of the people that were wearing masks, we even discussed the attempts at coronavirus vaccines and how the animals died in the experimental stage when introduced to the wild virus, but then everything changed with her. She applauded Newsom's locking down the state, I kept asking if the hospitals were full and she would say no, but our wave hasn't hit yet! She was wearing a mask even to meet us on the beach for a walk when the mask mandate hit. She told me people were occasionally coming into the ER after receiving a positive test and had slight symptoms but would tell her nurses to tell the patient with an eye roll, come back when they couldn't breathe.
Why arent you offering other treatments, I asked? Because we're waiting for the NIH to give us guidance. She literally told me "I trust Fauci, he knows his stuff." I decided to test the waters with her and sent her a video of a doctor in Texas that was treating patients with nebulized budesanide and she replied "he sounds like a quack." I pulled up his experience of being in practice for over 30 years and getting his degree in very respected medical schools and she said that didn't mean anything, she knew a lot of quack doctors that she would never let treat her or her family.
I probably don't have to even add how excited she was when she showed me that she received the vaccine when they were first handing it out to hospital staff.
So yeah, I don't know what's going on in the brains of these "higher educated" people but it's not critical thinking.
Love the yoga teacher's comments. I'm a yoga teacher, too, and was totally freaked out by everyone rushing like lunatics to get their injections here in Melbourne last year. The atmosphere in my city was already oppressive after all the lockdown madness, but the injection frenzy added a sinister dimension that truly terrified me. I will never understand what the hell got into people.
Another great piece Mark. And I genuinely like your painting. Delete it's very pertinent message, and my vaccinated wife would have that on a wall in our house (yes, I'm sad about this). As for the Yoga instructor, it has been my experience that anyone remotely associated with Yoga, in all it's variations, is working on limiting that damned Ego.... and, as such, sees everything more clearly than those more distracted, egocentric souls.
If you ask a person what kind of milk they like in their latte, they usually have a quick answer based on health or preference, and are often quite knowledgeable about why they prefer it. If you ask them what kind of substance is being in injected into their body, they have no idea whatsoever. Perhaps we could work to reverse this trend, so people apply at least as much scrutiny to such an important and potentially deadly decision. Laughin' and cryin' but I ain't lyin'.
Much easier to “go along to get along” then go against the grain. Most people including my family tell me to move on and stop talking about it. For them, it is over. Just like that, they dismiss the whole Covid debacle. I just can’t forget these 2.5 years. It wears on me everyday. Maybe I need to take up yoga! Great article, Mark!
Most of us in these Substacks, have learned more than any doctor in the last 29 months!
Mark - first, you are quite the talented artist!
In a last ditch effort to try and wake up my brother (74 and with an IQ of 149) I mailed him RFK Jr.’s book A LETTER TO LIBERALS. I thought the passage in the book about how Galileo’s fellow scientists refused to look thru his telescope would speak to him - he’s an amateur astronomer (built his first telescope at the age of 13) and was the director of a planetarium. He returned the unread book. Told me Bobby was a charlatan and an opportunist. Said Galileo’s fellow scientists were NOT scientists. Said I was uneducated (I did not attend college) and that I am part of a cult. He said kiss me goodbye because you’ll probably never see me again - to which I did. I didn’t cry until he drove away - I think I was in shock. I am prepared for him to never wake up despite the evidence. I had been in the anger stages of grief over the loss of this once extremely close relationship. Now I am working towards the acceptance stage. And the saddest part is that his twin brother is of the exact same mindset. He lives in Hawaii - we haven’t spoken in months. The mass formation is real. I pray everyday.
Although I have been adamantly opposed to the jabs from the start (40 years in pharma-- I know how to recognize bad studies) my husband chose to believe his cardiologist and internist who highly recommended that he not only the get the initial series but also boosters. I would have liked the opportunity to ask his MD's the questions that the yoga instructor posed (no pun intended) but my husband knew I probably would embarrass them as I had with my statin questions. It is hard to make people understand that physicians may NOT know best. I believe MD's should be held liable for their recommendations as the actual data never lined up with the marketing message.
Thanks for writing this piece
I am a primary care doctor that when asked would say “I don’t know” ,I don’t know the short medium or long side effects because time has not passed! I was and still am so baffled at how people would be so willingly be part of a medical experiment
Why would they ask me what are the side effects? I would tell them I don’t know what can happen to you in 6 months,1 year,5 years ,10 years or more -I said—nobody knows!
There’s no control group now (well there’s a silent control group )
I also made patients question .the young and healthy..your risk is very low..I don’t know the risk of this -patient’s fear was so palpable and out of proportion
Luckily I was able to help some-usually people that you would think were the “least educated” were the wisest -they didn’t want to go to the hospital or be part of the experiment (unfortunately most of them were so coherced and needed their jobs they HAD to do it )-so sad
I gave examples of other drugs being banned after years of “safe and effective” use
In reality I knew- I strongly did not recommend it
ARN getting into your cells and messing your genes/proteins? How can that be good and safe? I knew already cancers, autoimmune diseases would happen.
I didn’t allow my mom to get it
I told my husband from day 1-he was skeptical as well ,told him this will be hard to prove medically like everything else
I didn’t know I was going to see all these illnesses happen so quick
Speaking in past tense because I lost that job of 10 years
This is an uphill battle with blind people
Not sure how this will be fixed -I hope it does soon because it’s so sad to think this is the world my young daughters have to live..I try to instill critical thinking skills every day
( i say even if ALL the kids in the school do something but YOU think it’s wrong or unsafe -don’t do it! Even if you are the ONLY one!)
I asked my local state reps to share with me the scientific data they were basing their support of mask mandates on. One sent me to an NPR podcast, the other told me “as a frontline nurse of 32 years who, with many thousands of my colleagues have worn masks for long periods of time before COVID, and a professional whose career and patients have depended on understanding the hierarchy of evidence (quality) I can assure you that I am not giving in to uninformed hysteria and panic” nor am I virtue signaling.... it is clear we disagree on this”
I had sent her links to several studies showing the inefficacy of masks, to which that was her response.
I replied that “In your position of representative of the people, I would ask for more than “agree to disagree”... I would ask that you engage with the studies I sent”
She replied that “I don’t want to get into an evidence slinging contest with you, there would be no point”
This was last November. I will likely be voting republican for the first time in my life just to spite this condescending entitlement.
Great piece! And I like your painting. I'm laughing because in my city, which is rapidly being run into the ground by leftist idiots, to display that message would make my dimbulb neighbors find another block to walk their dogs down. But that wouldn't bother me.
I have a lot of MD friends and for the most part they don't question what comes down from on high or if they do they're way too status conscious to squawk about it. The culture of medicine is one of hierarchical bullying and kowtowing. So many of these docs still think Fauci is "doing an outstanding job". His words.
Nice going you pack of buffoons. I pity you.
When I was eight my brother told me there was a monster under my bed. I was scared of this monster and couldn’t sleep so my brother told me to stay under the blankets because monsters can’t penetrate blankets. When morning came and I was still alive, the eight year old me truly believed that monsters couldn’t penetrate blankets. Eventually I realized that the blanket wasn’t protecting me. There wasn’t a monster under the bed.
They told people there was a monster under the bed and so many people believed them. They also believed that the monster couldn’t penetrate their masks. They still haven’t realized that there is no monster under the bed. My eight year old self could have told them that.
many md's, nurses, and lawyers are protective of their 'licenses' and will not 'rock the boat'.
from experts at nih/cdc, to practicing professionals the stark ignorance of risks posed by accepting a hypothesis is exploringly obvious.
when they say 'safe and effective' my reply is 'what is the probability that that hypothesis you just affirmed is false'?
the answer is for these:
'far too high'!
and politicians who a month ago were firing people for no jab are now blaming trump & warp speed for the harm they caused.
The difference in cognitive style between the establishment-aligned and the dissident or, one might say, conscience-aligned, is rather stark isn't it? For the former, truth is determined socially by reference to authority pronouncement. For the latter, who said what is rather irrelevant: what matters is the structure of the argument and how well it does or does not conform to the observable world.
The result is one group inhabiting a hallucinatory hall of mirrors, which has been driven quite insane; and another, which inhabits reality.
Of course, to the authoritarians, we look quite insane. But again, the big difference is that they're not really capable of explaining why we're crazy, aside from 'you don't agree with authorities'. While we are perfectly capable of pointing out the inconsistencies in the authoritarian hyperreality, and doing so in detail.
LOL! Los Angeles is offering free Covid testing for pets . . . gotta use up those paid-for test kits.
Mark this is another of your brilliant insights from seemingly ordinary daily encounters. I expect most of your readers practically “know” both characters in the story. I feel like I do.
I have to applaud your willingness to engage where so many of us keep quiet and go about our business.
I have a good friend that's a doctor and works at the hospital. She makes fun of my healthy eating and thought it strange that vitamin A helped a skin problem I was having on my hands.
When Covid first made the news she told me it was just a disease that killed old and unhealthy people, this is no big deal, SARS was scary she said, that was killing young people. She was flying back from China before the lockdown and making fun of the people that were wearing masks, we even discussed the attempts at coronavirus vaccines and how the animals died in the experimental stage when introduced to the wild virus, but then everything changed with her. She applauded Newsom's locking down the state, I kept asking if the hospitals were full and she would say no, but our wave hasn't hit yet! She was wearing a mask even to meet us on the beach for a walk when the mask mandate hit. She told me people were occasionally coming into the ER after receiving a positive test and had slight symptoms but would tell her nurses to tell the patient with an eye roll, come back when they couldn't breathe.
Why arent you offering other treatments, I asked? Because we're waiting for the NIH to give us guidance. She literally told me "I trust Fauci, he knows his stuff." I decided to test the waters with her and sent her a video of a doctor in Texas that was treating patients with nebulized budesanide and she replied "he sounds like a quack." I pulled up his experience of being in practice for over 30 years and getting his degree in very respected medical schools and she said that didn't mean anything, she knew a lot of quack doctors that she would never let treat her or her family.
I probably don't have to even add how excited she was when she showed me that she received the vaccine when they were first handing it out to hospital staff.
So yeah, I don't know what's going on in the brains of these "higher educated" people but it's not critical thinking.
Love the yoga teacher's comments. I'm a yoga teacher, too, and was totally freaked out by everyone rushing like lunatics to get their injections here in Melbourne last year. The atmosphere in my city was already oppressive after all the lockdown madness, but the injection frenzy added a sinister dimension that truly terrified me. I will never understand what the hell got into people.
Another great piece Mark. And I genuinely like your painting. Delete it's very pertinent message, and my vaccinated wife would have that on a wall in our house (yes, I'm sad about this). As for the Yoga instructor, it has been my experience that anyone remotely associated with Yoga, in all it's variations, is working on limiting that damned Ego.... and, as such, sees everything more clearly than those more distracted, egocentric souls.
If you ask a person what kind of milk they like in their latte, they usually have a quick answer based on health or preference, and are often quite knowledgeable about why they prefer it. If you ask them what kind of substance is being in injected into their body, they have no idea whatsoever. Perhaps we could work to reverse this trend, so people apply at least as much scrutiny to such an important and potentially deadly decision. Laughin' and cryin' but I ain't lyin'.