I took a trip to a local grocery store this morning to get some coffee and bread. I was surprised to see a line formed outside of the front doors, similar to ones we’ve seen not so long ago.

“That’s weird,” I thought as I peeked into the seemingly empty store expecting it to be visibly busy, so I asked the security guard why people were being held back.

He told me that there were only two cashiers working and that the lines to pay were causing unacceptable congestion. I couldn’t tell if this was true from outside so I just shrugged my shoulders and plodded back into line.

My little detour managed to lose me a few spots so I ended up waiting for an additional 10 minutes, not because the line was long but because the tiny trickle of people leaving/entering was excruciatingly slow.

In all, roughly 5 people had left by the time I got inside the spacious store. Not exactly the deluge that I was given as a reason for being kept outside in the first place. But maybe the crowd was inside, away from view?

Nope.

As I circled the store there I counted no more than 30 people inside, and no one at the checkouts. There was only one entrance / exit so unless these “long lines” spontaneously de-materialized into thin air, where did all of the shoppers disappear to?

I got a sort-of answer to my question when I strolled up to pay for my purchases at the still-completely-empty checkout. (This is not an exaggeration, there were literally no people in line).

I told the cashier that people were being made to wait outside based on a claim that the store, or at least the cashiers, were crowded. Except … where were all the people?

She turned to me and with a heavy, sputtering Filipino accent said, “only have two cashiers working so need to limit lines. Too many people!”

“Yeah, I already heard that. But what lines?”

“Would you like bags, sir?” she replied, seemingly ignoring my question.

I leaned in and made an obvious show of looking around to try to spot these imaginary “lines” of people, then asked again, “what lines?”

She stared at me blankly for a moment, as if the question had overloaded her brain, and only managed to blurt out “bags?” a second time before turning away. Didn’t even wait for my response.

I decided to ask one more time. “I’m sorry, what lines are you talking about? Was it very busy earlier?”

She turned around and, once again seemingly ignoring the obvious revelation that she and store security had been shoveling bullshit, cocked her head to the side with noticeable annoyance (I guess at having to hold up the throngs of invisible people waiting behind me), and asked once again if I wanted bags.

I decided to drop the questions. I knew it wasn’t a language barrier; she’d already used the same words I had. This was possibly an example of cognitive dissonance on full display. Or maybe it was a form of genuine mental illness in which she was hallucinating long lines of people where there were none. Maybe this was what life is like in the government’s “new reality”.

This could almost be a humorous anecdote if it wasn’t so indicative of the general public’s unwillingness / inability to see the reality that’s quite literally right in front of them.

When the police or military brutalize them, kick in their house doors, or violently pull them out of their cars for staying out too late or not obeying the newest set of arbitrary government dictates, as is being done in Australia (be sure to read the last few paragraphs!), a virtuous example being promoted here in Canada, these same people will ostensibly deny that what they’re experiencing actually exists. And we can be certain that this won’t be the result of a philosophical inquisition into the nature of reality.

It’s hard to know when a line has been crossed when that line doesn’t even exist.

So it’s been about a week since our betters passed a municipal bylaw requiring the imposition of mandatory indoor masks pretty much everywhere except schools and daycare, transportation (noting that the TTC has its own bylaws), medical facilities, and residential buildings.

There are some neat specifics for businesses, like bars, which can legally allow patrons indoors:

*The bylaw allows for temporary removal of a mask or face covering when receiving services (such as having a meal) or while actively engaging in an athletic or fitness activity.

How thoughtful! You’re allowed to temporarily lift your mask to shove a fry in your mouth or down a few gulps of lager.

The implied stupidity makes it really hard to take it seriously. And I suspect this is why many people doubt government so-called experts and advisors. After all, this is the same caliber of people who brought us things like the smoking bylaw that penalizes business owners if they fail to police a 9 meter (29.5 feet) radius in front of their premises, a distance that often extends well into the street if not all the way across.

I haven’t heard of anyone being rounded up into cattle cars yet so for me the mask bylaw has so far been only a mild irritant. And there are loopholes in it that are big enough to drive a truck through. Nevertheless, I sympathize with the people who see this as a slippery slope.

Developments like the increasingly indefinite emergency measures being introduced by Doug Ford’s lackeys, when compared with something like the 9/11 anti-terror laws that over the years have never really abated, tend to produce some very plausible conclusions even if those conclusions haven’t yet been borne out.

When Doug Ford claims it’s not a power grab are we to assume he’s being honest? The oxymoron doth run deep there.

So is it so surprising when we find people resisting increasingly dictatorial demands by the state even as that same state tells us that Covid infections are way down “but we have to be ready for the next wave”? Sounds an awful lot like arbitrary, indefinite lockdowns and a complete stripping of people’s rights in the name of “public health measures“.

On top of that, it seems that in their frenzied efforts to impose their controls, governments may actually be openly violating the laws of their masters, something I realized while observing an interaction at a bank between a woman refusing to wear a mask and a front-door security officer refusing her access (to her own money).

The woman was showing the rent-a-cop the bylaw and claiming she had an illness, therefore couldn’t wear a mask. The diminutive female guard asked the woman what kind of illness she had and even after she was told it was asthma there was a lot of hemming and hawing.

At first I thought, how shitty of the government to make the businesses and ultimately their employees responsible for facing people’s wrath in increasingly tense times. Besides, I doubt most of these Covid bouncers have any training in determining which illnesses may or may not qualify so putting the onus on them to make safety decisions seems quite reckless.

Moreover, aren’t there provincial health privacy laws that specifically prevent random people demanding answers to exactly these types of questions? Aren’t business owners opening themselves up to lawsuits if they follow the city bylaw? Or do municipal laws supersede provincial legislation now?

Maybe until they get their act together we should #defundthestate

It’s that time of year again when government rolls out the “get your flu shot!” propaganda under the usual auspices of “keeping everyone safe”.

Well, you know…government.

Now I know that there are questions about the safety of flu vaccines, some of which (especially those indicated for very young children) contain thimerosal as a preservative, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

There are anecdotal indications in the news, and of course I have my own personal experiences with not contracting seasonal bugs while those around me (who proudly got the jab) got repeatedly sick, but these are hardly objective. So for this post I wanted to do a more thorough analysis using the statistics being provided by the very people making the claim that the flu shot keeps you safer: https://www.ontario.ca/page/flu-facts

On the same page that touts the flu shot as “the most effective way to protect yourself and your family from the flu”, the “Flu Facts” page links to Google’s flu tracker to provide yearly data on the infectious disease: http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/

The flu vaccine wasn’t widely promoted by the government until 2008 but has been promoted for kids since 2004. These dates, along with historical population numbers, provide a good basis to work with.

Here are the results of that work:

I split up the values into two ranges (pre-2008 and post-2008) for which complete data sets were available. For example, although flu data is available for 2003, it’s only for a portion of that year so I excluded it. Similarly, since 2015 isn’t finished yet, I left it out. The above numbers are condensed from a larger data set which you can download as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls / .xlsx), or an Open Office / Libre Office spreadsheet (.ods), and you can always recreate the calculations from the sources I linked to above.

Of course it would be a wild leap to say that you are more likely to contract the flu because of the introduction of the flu vaccine (though this may actually be true), I think that this result demonstrates that the inverse claim is also dubious. In fact, it looks like the trend for influenza infections is actually climbing rather than receding.

What’s unfortunate is that many people, often the same ones that uphold objective science and reject theology, are willing to entirely and instantly reject any such claims when they’re contrary to those pushed forward by the “authorities”. Sounds like dogmatic religion to me, but what do I know, I must just be a bitter anti-vaxxer.

You know how it is … you’re strolling down the street thinking to yourself, “you know, it’d be nice to have a massive, fatal coronary right here and now”. Except every time you’ve tried that, those damn EMS people come by and resuscitate you.

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that the Toronto Star has put out a handy-dandy guide to the best spots to kick off in such a manner. And wouldn’t you know it, the place to be is in my old neighbourhood; what what!!

The recent news that hundreds of students in Ottawa have been suspended from school for not proving they’ve been immunized reminded me of what’s wrong with the thinking behind the whole effort. Or rather, the lack of thinking behind it.

I’m not going to go into what I think of immunizations themselves, just the argument behind legally requiring everyone to get them (which is not actually true, but why bother with facts or ask any questions?)

The best argument supporting immunization is: look at how far we’ve come and how many diseases we’ve virtually eradicated … introducing an unvaccinated child into a school potentially reverses all of that progress and puts everyone at risk!

Right…

So if we bring a kid with, say, polio into a school where all the other kids have been vaccinated, they’re all at risk of catching polio? In other words, the vaccine is so ineffective that the moment you sneak the bug back into the general population, it’s game over. So get your shots so that everyone’s protected!

I suppose one could make the argument that if you choose not to be vaccinated and subsequently contract the illness, you should have to pay for your own treatments. Harsh, and not something I would support (my tax money supports lots of chronically ill people and I think that’s just fine), but at least there’s a cold, logical connection there.

But to claim that the vaccinated population is at risk of contracting the very disease that they’ve been “protected” against by being exposed to said disease, however that happens,  is such an idiotic, nonsensical, and backwards argument that it’s hard to believe that anyone could repeat it without bursting into laughter.

The other argument I often hear is that if we allow people to make choices for themselves, they will choose to abstain from vaccinations and we’re going to end up with a pandemic, essentially destroying our healthcare system, etc. Basically, it’s about money, and isn’t it ridiculous of us to expect to be taken care of by the government that takes so much of our money under the auspices of using it to take care of us? If it’s good for us, we should be forced into it, so it’s vaccinations, cigarettes, booze, and a dizzying array of “safe” pharmaceuticals and continued government vigilance for everyone!

If you believe that vaccinations are ultimately useful, I’m happy to support your right to that opinion, and I’m even willing to have a part of my tax money to provide you with vaccinations (in fact, this is happening without my consent anyways), should you choose to get them. Choice is the operative word here.

In the meantime, let’s not throw around these infantile arguments that do nothing but imply that we’re all complete idiots while we’re forced to succumb to them whether we like it or not. It adds insult to injury.

US Center for Disease Control Statistics (2006)

Deaths and serious problems from vaccines: 772
Deaths and serious problems from “vaccine-preventable” diseases: 772
Deaths from cigarette smoking (2004): 443,000

Hey, the government’s just protecting everyone’s health, right? The shot (sure to become standard across Canada), is just the epitome of safety and efficacy after all…

…the federal government has recommended the HPV vaccination for girls and boys as young as 11. But it has caused thousands of adverse reactions, including seizures, paralysis, blindness, pancreatitis, speech problems, short-term memory loss, Guillain-Barré syndrome and even death.

“At present there are no significant data showing that either Gardasil or Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline) can prevent any type of cervical cancer since the testing period employed was too short to evaluate long-term benefits of HPV vaccination,” according to the Annals of Medicine.

Referring to the information on the damage claims, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “This new information from the government shows that the serious safety concerns about the use of Gardasil have been well-founded.”

He added, “Public health officials should stop pushing Gardasil on children.”

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and Canadian Blood Services is
partnering up to host Ontario’s biggest single blood donor clinic. The goal:
to collect 500 units of blood in one day. That means we need donations from
500 people. It’s happening at the ACC on Monday, June 20, from 10am-7pm.

Why? Because we need to raise awareness and educate. Despite the fact that
50% of the Canadian population can donate, only 3.7% do. In Toronto, only
1.8% donate. Toronto needs to import 50,000 units of blood a year to meet
the needs of patients in this region. So we need Torontonians to step up,
rally together and donate. Because let’s face it – the status of one’s
health can be unpredictable and you never know when you or someone you love
will need it.

Call 1-888-2-DONATE to book an appointment at The Big Save.

Here’s the link and our Facebook page:
www.blood.ca/thebigsave
www.facebook.com/CentralOntarioBlood

… Continue Reading

I finally managed to get my ass out of doors early enough this morning to walk instead of taking the streetcar, and I ran into a giant roadblock.

And that’s not even the worst of it. I initially woke up feeling a bit off  but I attributed that to a lack of sleep. By mid-day, I was suspecting the company pumpkin carving contest (we won!), had done me in. But at three o’clock, I excused myself and went home.

Now I’m panicking. Did I eat any pork recently? Oh my God! I had bacon for breakfast last Saturday! Islam and Judaism had it right all along!

If I’ve got the pork flu, it’s way too late for a vaccination. And one of my cubicle buddies had something unpleasant for the past few days; went down suddenly last night and never made it in this morning. :O

And *gasp* look at the lineups for H1N1 shots this morning!

(big!)

Oh, wait, that’s just the starting spot. I followed the line down the sidewalk at right. It made another tight snaking pattern into an adjacent courtyard in front of Metro Hall, and wound it’s way back out onto the sidewalk.

I took to the sidewalk again and walked to the end of the block, turned around, and started side-stepping in an ill-conceived attempt to montage the line:

(biger!)

In places where people aren’t obviously lined up, they’re just behind something. You can sometimes just make out their cute little heads poking up over bushes.

But most of them may be doomed because there are an awful lot people there and, according to some accounts, clinics are only managing about 20 per hour. People were being turned away in the hundreds yesterday because they hadn’t gotten in by the time the place closed. And, *chuckle*, people are not gonna be happy to hear that now there’s a shortage of the vaccine. Dopey bureaucracy may have killed us all.

It wouldn’t have made any difference for me. Whatever I’ve got has already made itself at home and a shot yesterday would’ve been too late.

All I have left now is a thermometer, electric heating blanket, and Oliver to apply pressure to the sore areas. Luckily I’d splurged recently and now have a healthy collection of tissue boxes (with soothing aloe!) to accompany these small comforts. Dear reader, the snot’s running wild and free tonight!