Yet Another Perspective

 

H/t Caryma Sa'd

My friend Steve sent me the following, his thoughts on the trucker protest, a protest he, like countless others, is fed up with. With his permission, I am posting it here:

1. 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated. Most vaccination mandates are decided provincially or locally. Even if the federal government were to drop the vaccine mandate for truckers, Canadian truckers entering the States are still required to be vaccinated.

2. The convoy was NOT sanctioned or organized by the Canadian Truckers Association. 

3. Two of the three principal organizers have never been truckers and have stated publicly they want to “overthrow” the Canadian government, and that doesn’t mean an election.

4. Most of the truckers I see on television are middle aged white guys. Many of the truckers I see on the road are south Asian.

5. The group has attracted the racist, lunatic fringe, and the antivaxxers from across the country who make up perhaps 5% of the population.

6. The convoy organizers have lost control of the group when their participants desecrate the War Memorial or Terry Fox statue and when front and centre on Wellington St., the truck reads “Fuck Trudeau”. Back in the day, we had 40,000 teachers protesting in TO and Hamilton abs had nothing like that.

8. Heightened security is costing Ottawa $800,000 per day.

9. Over and over, I hear the truckers involved spout the same lines, “My rights”. “My freedom”. Well. Take a look at China. They’ve closed down cities of 13 mil when they have a few dozen cases! No one goes to work. Basic groceries are delivered to your door. Maybe these truckers should experience that type of freedom?

I’m not getting burnt out on vaccines, mandates or mask wearing, I’m getting fed up with the antivaxxers.

A Real Trucker's Perspective

 It would seem that real truckers do their jobs, unlike the poseurs still in Ottawa.

Putting Things Into Perspective

We have heard so many words these past few days, noble utterances coming from ignoble sources. I believe the following sets things into an interesting perspective.

The Rabble Cries For Truth

Problem is, only their 'truth' is acceptable.

H/t Johnny Fondue

Big Wheels Keep On Turning

 

H/t Michael de Adder

Indicted By Their Words

 

H/t Theo Moudakis

I find myself singularly uninterested in the so-called freedom convoy making its way to Ottawa. Peopled by many rabid-anti-vaxxers and those filled with a messianic zeal in the belief that they are 'standing up for freedom and democracy', they are in fact arguing for the opposite, a short-circuiting of  democracy, demanding the government's immediate resignation.

They are truly deluded and contemptible.

The true measure of these benighted people can be taken in the kind of hate-filled screeds they send off to politicians, medical personnel and journalists. It is the latter that Bob Hepburn writes about, saying it is time to call out nasty, hate-filled anti-vaxers.

Here are some of the milder excerpts of missives he has received:

“If I see you on the street I would Smash your face in YOU FU*KING IGNORANT COMMIE,” wrote a person identifying themselves as Sonny.

“You are a hate-monger and a sad excuse for a journalist. What you are doing is un-Canadian. You are a piece of sh* t,” wrote Rob, who works as a multimedia specialist.

“You are a menace to society. You have obviously lost your mind and need mental help if you think unvaccinated people are a threat to society. You are deranged,” wrote Nicole from Alberta.

“This is what causes racism. You have no business knowing what goes in my body. You piece of human waste,” wrote John.

“God bless your soul if you still even have one,” wrote Diane.

“You are an arrogant moron,” wrote Dave.

“Stop spewing hate and writing sh*t articles. Grow a pair and write something useful. Gerbil looking ass,” wrote Brad. 

Not surprisingly, these cowards refused Hepburn's request to publish their names, places where they live, or companies they work at if the email was sent from a business. Such hate-mongers shun the sanitizing light of day.

Hepburn ends his piece with this:

It’s time to call them out — and it’s time that others who are unvaccinated get to know the type of anti-vaxxers who believe they speak on their behalf.

And well we should. Their very words indict them. 

Covidiots: The Clay Feet Edition

Boomers like me often live in the past when it comes to musical idols: the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison. to name but three, were the gods at whose altars we worshipped. The problems with gods, however, is that they often have clay feet, something we would have been inclined perhaps to overlook in our younger years.

The time for such willful blindness, however, has passed, especially since some idols are now abusing their power to the detriment of society. Going beyond the incomprehensible and inexcusable anti-lockdown stance taken by fellow-musician Van Morrison, Eric Clapton has gone into the realm of the absurd, claiming that those of us who have acted responsibly by getting vaccinated against Covid-19 are victims of mass hypnosis.

In a new interview for The Real Music Observer YouTube channel, Eric has claimed that [...] subliminal messaging hidden in advertising led people to get the jab. 

His eyes were 'opened' by 

....a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], [who] talked about it.

'And it's great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.

'Then I remembered seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising. It had been going on for a long time: that thing about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." 

'And I thought, "What's that mean?" And bit by bit, I put a rough kind of jigsaw puzzle together. And that made me even more resolute.'

Mass formation psychosis - an attempt to hypnotise groups of people to follow messages against their will - has been widely discredited by scientists.  

What led Clapton into this disordered thinking? It was his personal experience with the AstraZeneca vaccine which, he says, worsened his pre-existing peripheral neuropathy.

In a message to his music producer, he said: 'I took the first jab of AZ [AstraZeneca] and straight away had severe reactions which lasted ten days.' 

The 76-year-old said he 'recovered eventually' but suffered further 'disastrous reactions' six weeks later after the second shot.

He added: 'My hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again...

'I should never have gone near the needle. But the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone.'

I am certainly willing to admit the possibility that the vaccine, in his case, worsened his neuropathy. However, doctors say that the risks of getting Covid are greater than the risk of adverse reactions from vaccines. In any event, what I find unforgiveable about Clapton's stance is his monstrous ego. Because he says he suffered an adverse reaction, he is now actively discouraging others from getting protection, putting countless lives at risk.

That is not the work of a god. It is more like that of a devil.