The author of this piece of stupidity long ago blocked me, but of course that doesn't stop me seeing his stuff.

This, however, is the sort of reason he blocked me; had he not I would have ripped him a new ******* on Twitter.  Since he blocked me, I'll do it here.

If we someday learn..... "you were guessing"?

Oh really?

Well let's talk facts eh?  None of these are in dispute, by the way.

• Coronaviruses circulate in humans all the time.  Four of them, to be specific.  Two are in the same family as Covid-19; they are beta coronaviruses, as is Covid.  One of them, OC43, is believed to have caused a pandemic -- in the 1890s.  Why doesn't it now?  Because it circulates all the time and most kids wind up getting it very young, since the circulation pattern suggests roughly a four year rotation.  That's right -- by the time you're eight you've lived through two rotations through the population of this, and the other three, circulating Coronaviruses.
  
  
• These four almost never produce any serious problems for children.  Neither does Covid.  On the data thus far, and we knew this before the first shot went into the first arm in December of 2020, if all 60 million kids under 18 got Covid-19 about 500 of them would die.  That's the data.  Likewise, the other 4 common coronaviruses almost never produce serious outcomes.  They do produce colds and flus -- as does Covid-19 in kids.
  
  
• All four of these, when someone is infected, produce durable protection against serious and fatal outcomes in the future.  The exception is the odd person who is old and has damaged immunity, and their former protection becomes worthless.  Yes, occasionally an old person gets killed by OC43 as their prior immunity becomes worthless.  Are you noting a pattern here yet or do you already suck at logic?
  
  
• There is no evidence that once infected by Covid-19 and you survive the infection you are at material risk of a second bad infection.  There is a small, but non-zero risk, you can get it again, and my presumption is that if it follows the pattern of other coronaviruses, which tend to run in 3-4 year cycles, you will get it again in a few years.  But despite this the odds are well under 1 in 1,000 that said second infection will be serious or worse and with each re-challenge your immunity will become broader and deeper, just as occurs with the other four.  There are at this point multiple sets of data with confirmed infection counts well over 1,000 in each data set with no critical or fatal outcomes in any of them and several have had zero reinfections of any sort.  In other words there is no evidence that the pattern for the other four coronaviruses that circulate among humans is not what we will see here.  Gee, are we detecting a pattern yet or do you really suck at logic?
  
  
• There has never been a successful and safe vaccine against coronaviruses in man or beast.  None.  Ever.  All have either (1) proved to be short-lived protection, (2) backfired spectacularly and enhanced infection on re-challenge including every animal under test dying on re-challenge, (3) produced a really nasty side effect profile that over time is more dangerous than the disease -- or some ugly combination of all three.  There are no exceptions.  A particular example is a chicken coronavirus where vaccination lasts just long enough for a broiler to reach size and be slaughtered -- a bit less than two months.  Laying hens must be continually re-inoculated to maintain protection.  Attempts to vaccinate cats have killed every cat under test.  May I note that felines are one of the animal families that can get and transmit Covid-19?  Again, perhaps this is the exception but if it is it will be the first success following an extensive set of failures reaching back decades, many of which produced serious and fatal outcomes.  Again: Are you detecting a pattern here yet on the waning of immunity from jabs given the history of prior attempts?
  
  
• There is no evidence that deleting the "N" protein from the in-use US vaccines in fact eliminates the risk of enhanced disease.  That's the hypothesis underlying the decision to do that but there was no evidence for it in actual human testing, which simply was not done in advance and six months -- or in fact a year or two -- is too short to find out.  Indeed most of the mutation in a coronavirus takes place in the "S" protein which is the part we're using.  This would be reasonably expected to produce evasion over time through natural forces.  We did it anyway.
  
  
• We knew prior to release of these vaccines for general use and their "mandates" that the majority of the antibodies produced were not neutralizing; they were binding.  A binding antibody can enhance infection.  Given that we had decades of history with the non-durability of neutralizing antibodies with attempts to vaccinate against coronaviruses what is the reasonable expectation for what will happen if that occurs this time but binding antibodies are still present?  Proof?  No; there was no proof.  But what evidence existed that this approach was safe?  NONE!  Indeed, the evidence, such as it was, all ran the other way although it certainly was not conclusive.  We did it anyway.
  
  
• Prior to general release (September of 2020) there was published a paper characterizing pathogenic potential for the spike protein alone, absent the rest of the virus.  That paper demonstrated the potential for direct injury, specifically to the endothelium (the layer of cells that is the inner lining of your blood vessels!)  This was a theoretical paper and it set off a bevvy of other studies.  One of them, appearing to confirm that hypothesis, was published in pre-print in December 2020 before the shots went into arms.  It was subsequently peer-reviewed and passed upon during that process, being published on a formal basis early this year.  We jabbed people anyway despite, at that point, having in-vitro (lab) evidence that the spike protein we were causing to be produced in the human body was inherently and separately dangerous without the rest of the virus being present.  This paper, standing alone, was enough to call into question the safety of these jabs even if there was no virus at all!  We proceeded anyway.

So no, it is not guessing to take all of these facts, none of which are in dispute, and conclude that:

• There is no reason to believe we can successfully, on a long-term basis, vaccinate against a coronavirus since we never have before in either man or beast.
  
  
• There is no reason to believe attempting to vaccinate against coronaviruses is safe because in many other instances it was proved to be not, and in some it resulted in fatality of many or all the animals under test upon rechallenge.  One specific instance of wildly-enhanced disease occurred in cats, which is a species that we know can become infected by this virus.
  
  
• There is no reason to believe that deliberately inducing the presence of binding antibodies in a person to this virus, which we knew the vaccines did before the EUAs were issued, would be safe on a durable basis.  In fact we had every reason to believe that would be unsafe simply based on what that sort of antibody does on a biological basis.  You would in fact be crazily homicidal to deliberately infuse only binding antibodies to this or any other virus into a person.
  
  
• There was plenty of reason to believe the spike protein, alone, was dangerous even without the rest of the virus and this was known prior to mass-distribution of the jabs.  While getting infected certainly could lead to trouble in this regard infection is not certain where vaccination, once you do it, is.  Further, the dosing for the vaccines is set to produce much higher levels of spike protein (and thus antibodies) in the body than does natural infection, so any such risk from the spike would logically be expected to be higher from vaccination than natural infection.
  
  
• As regards children there is not now and never has been an argument for giving them a Covid-19 vaccine.  They do not require or benefit from any protection that it might afford on a statistical basis and since we know there are dangers, many of which we have no way to quantify and will not be able to do so for ten or more years it is a rank violation of logic and the Hippocratic Oath, never mind gross negligence and malpractice, to administer or permit to be administered same to kids.

So no, if this turns out to be an utterly insane and disastrous choice to so-state doing this was stupid in advance, as I and some others have done, was not a "wild guess."

It was an educated process of deduction that led me, and many others, to the conclusion that it was stupid to proceed and particularly stupid to do so in someone who had previously had Covid-19 since whatever risk was inherent in getting the spike in one's body they had already taken said risk, was at extraordinarily low risk of a subsequent infection, if it occurred, being more than a nuisance and thus such a person had no reason to take such a "vaccine."

In addition it was and is criminally insane to advocate for or give these shots to healthy young people, especially those under 18, because statistically-speaking they are at no risk of serious or fatal outcome from the disease itself in the first place and thus whatever unbounded, unknown harms may accrue are being forced upon them by others without any rational expectation of benefit to the young person injected.

Now we may well prove the serious nature and expectation of prospective harms are wrong in the fullness of time.  I am increasingly skeptical that will prove to be the case, but it still might, on balance, prove to be the right choice for certain adults, especially those with serious morbid conditions who have not previously had the disease prior to being jabbed.

But on the manifest weight of the evidence it most-certainly was not a "guess."  It was a well-educated and well-read process of deduction based upon facts reaching back decades.

YOU, in fact, have been since the beginning of that debate and ARE, TODAY still spewing bull****.

Corporate America is, of course, corporate.  As a former CEO I am fully-aware of, and generally have no quarrel with, the premise of a corporation.  It has one purpose: To Make Money for the Shareholders.

Period.

It has no soul, morals or otherwise.  It can't have those attributes because it's not alive.

Woketopia is not the natural course of corporate behavior.  That's hubris, usually singularly-so within a few people.  They get into positions of power and because the others in power, and there are always others, have no balls.  Had they balls they'd point out that such woketopia garbage was inevitably going to damage the firm.  Maybe not immediately, but certainly.

The reason we have laws in a civilized society is that without them corporations -- large or small -- will seek to maximize profit and since there is no soul to keep said behavior in check it will be wildly destructive to society as a whole.

Yet corporations are really nothing more than agglomerations of people insulated from the direct consequences of other than willful criminal conduct.  .

A partnership does not have this feature; in a partnership a business loss is personal; it reaches beyond the walls of the business into the personal affairs and wealth of each and every partner on a ratable basis.  In a corporation this is never true.

Partnerships make sense only when all the people who hold said ownership interests can control outcomes.  This is why we have corporations; without them nobody in their right mind would place their hat in the ring without direct control over potential financial or criminal liability-generating acts.

We've decided, for good or bad, that the trade-off is worth it.  That's a debate for another time; this Ticker focuses on the perverse incentives that we have refused to put a stop to.

Wednesday morning some jackwad working on a house near mine -- either the water/sewer folks themselves or someone contracted to connect to them didn't bother calling the locator service and got out the backhoe.  They dug up a lateral hardline feeder for the cable internet that feeds my house -- but not just my house, as it was the lateral hardline they dug up, not the drop.

I called that in and, when I figured out what had happened and that the drop hadn't failed, called Spectrum back to tell them that the techs they were dispatching this morning had better be equipped to fix a lateral as the problem was clearly not in my home or the drop to it.  They assured me that was the case.

Well, it wasn't the case.  Two trucks rolled up with..... inside techs.  The guys with the ability to fix a drop provided they didn't have to dig or trench and, of course, they did not have the correct cable or splicing gear to fix the hardline.

It wasn't declared an "outage" by their automated equipment because the cut was on the feed to the last pedestal.  In other words, had it been 200' further up the line it would have shown enough people offline to be an "outage" instead of a "problem."

Now the annoyance factor of them having to call it back in locally this time, and have guy with the correct gear show up is on them; the annoyance of the other couple of hours of outage here is not the end of the world for Sarah or myself.  We have backup connectivity, and it works.  I'm writing this article using it.

No, the problem is Spectrum's.  They sent two trucks with dudes in them out to a residence on a wild goose chase where if they had believed the customer, who told them what to send, they might have sent the correct guy and gear yesterday instead.

So they took somewhere in the neighborhood of four man-hours, plus fuel, plus wear on the vehicles dispatched from wherever their office is that they start from every day and such for exactly..... nothing.

Did the stupid stop there?  Nope.  At about 1400 here come two more trucks!  Why?  Because indeed the guy across the street was off too.  Which I told them.  Which their idiot call center dude maintained was "just me" and thus didn't mandate calling it an "outage."  Which was complete crap and thus they didn't waste two trucks of dudes on a junk call it was four on two separate junk calls, plus the one guy who actually showed up and fixed it.

How hard would it have been, even if the call center didn't believe me, to ask for a picture?  No problem; I could have trivially sent them one to prove that I wasn't full of crap; the ripped-up cable was openly exposed in the trench and still is.

But their automated system apparently needs to see "some number" of people offline in a given area to call it an outage.  Short of that they don't and can't override it; they call it a "customer trouble ticket" no matter what they're told or how often they're told it, and thus do stupid things.  Since the call goes to some god-forsaken place and not a local dispatch center, which by the way will never call you back either to talk with you when someone with a brain is on the other end of the line what outcome do you get?

Stupidity.

This is a result of it's cheaper to have the calls all go to one center.

Just like when a 100-fibre bundle was chopped by a much-larger backhoe over toward Maryville earlier this year and wiped out basically everything from there in an arc to Gatlinburg on a holiday weekend.  Why?  There was no second link coming from a different direction so when the fiber got cut everything goes off.

Why no second fiber from a different direction?  It costs money and thus without a requirement to spend said money in a non-competitive environment, which is inherent any time you have limited rights-of-way (and you do for such services) they won't.

How about the Christmas Bombing in Nashville?  Same deal.  But in that case there was an actual legal requirement that the feed be redundant along with the switching.  Neither was true but both were legally required in the contract solicitation.  The bomb goes off, the switch gets disrupted and the fiber cut.  As a result there is no E911 service all the way from Nashville up into the SW corner of Virginia for several days because the provider who won the contract decided not to comply with its terms.

Or how about Texas and other states last winter?  Yes, it's cheaper to use electric booster pumps on a gas pipeline as an electric motor requires less maintenance (none, really) than a fuel-driven compressor.  It's also "greener", so they say, and thus they can and do virtue signal.  But a natural-gas fired compressor runs so long as there is gas in the pipe and it does not break, where an electric motor doesn't run when the solar panels and windmills don't produce power.  How many people had severe property damage due to burst pipes and such as a consequence?  How many died?  Who was held criminally and civilly accountable for said damage because they deliberately eschewed a known-better alternative in terms of reliability -- a choice made because it was "greener", they were virtue signaling by genuflecting to Greta and her goons while at the same time "saving" some maintenance costs? 

NOBODY.

And who let them do this in the first place?  The state regulatory boards for said services who were also genuflecting in front of those very same nutjobs.

Will a corporation always make this sort of choice absent consequences?  Yes.  In every case.  Is this acceptable for business-required or even emergency services required infrastructure?  No, never.  Is it acceptable for a residential guy like me when it comes to Internet service?  Probably.  But not for business connectivity, which they charge more money for, and certainly not for E911 which becomes a life-critical problem when it fails.  And not when it comes to piped gas and grid power in freezing weather either, especially when you have local regulations banning effective backups such as a wood stove.

Who's gone to jail for this?  Nobody.

And nobody will either.

Why not?

Because you won't build one of these in front of the offices of the local, state and federal legislators and cops and make clear that either they enforce laws and regulations prohibiting this bull**** -- now and forevermore -- or you're going to take heads.

This is the core problem with nearly everything that is going on in the world today, including Covid.

It is not the fact that corporations have no soul, because you can't change that.  You can't legislate a soul into existence.  But what you can do is hold the officers and directors criminally and financially accountable -- as in prison -- when they directly violate the law or commit open fraud in a solicitation, provision of data or otherwise.  You can extend that same punishment to government agencies and the people who work there.

This does not mean you hold people criminally liable for errors until and unless it rises to the level of negligence.  It does mean, however, that you hold them criminally liable for deliberate decisions to screw someone by either concealing data that is critical to the public interest (whether by direct concealment or intentional misrepresentation) or when they agree to do something and then do not.  It also means you must set reasonable standards in the first place so you have concrete metrics which to measure and then impose said punishment.

We haven't done any of that.

Does Spectrum care that they blew between four and eight man-hours because they were stupid?  Probably not.  It'll be another 10 cents of your bill that goes to pay that this month, and as for the actual trunk line repair the idjit that dug it up should get the bill for that, since they didn't call for a locate before using the backhoe.  Without effective competitive pressure which will never exist when there is a constrained right-of-way and thus you can't have multiple firms out there providing the service and expect reasonable pricing the only other option is regulatory in a form and fashion that the financial consequences of stupidity outweigh the profits.

Of course nobody wants to have THAT conversation, especially when it comes to the medical system -- do they?

There's only 500,000+ dead Americans that were killed as a result of not doing so and every single one of them is on us for our willful and intentional refusal to get off our ass, issue that demand and mean it.

Let me know when that changes for you.

Oops....

 In Israel a nosocomial outbreak was reported involving 16 healthcare workers, 23 exposed patients and two family members. The source was a fully vaccinated COVID-19 patient. The vaccination rate was 96.2% among all exposed individuals (151 healthcare workers and 97 patients). Fourteen fully vaccinated patients became severely ill or died, the two unvaccinated patients developed mild disease [[4]]

Not just oops, VEI.

Vaccine Enhanced Infections.

This is in The Lancet, a high-quality prestigious medical journal.

Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.

The vaccines do not cut off either infection or transmission and may in fact cause enhanced, more-serious disease.

Those trying to "mandate" jabs are not only attempting to force you to take the risk of serious cardiac and other clotting-related disorders they may also be setting you up to be killed by the virus itself.

Here's looking at you, Cramer.

.... you're dead?

Maybe.

But three strikes and you're out has been the rule for a very long time.  So how many strikes do we have here?

Let's cut the crap, shall we?  The mask mandates were known worthless by the people promoting them with alleged "science."  They knew they were lying.  The purpose of the mask mandates, all of which post-dated "warp speed" pre-purchases of an unproved technology that had never been successfully used before in man or beast was to do one and only one thing: Provide a basis of compliance and see if you'd eat the spouses and families of the mandating parties before issuing the REAL mandate.

After all, while wearing a mask was stupid and ineffective if it harmed that harm was modest to moderate in scope.  Worn for a long period of time or with inadequate protocol, which was a certainty in untrained persons within the general population who do not have access to other people's money to pay for the required interval changes of said masks or biological waste disposal associated with proper protocol, the physical harm was mostly limited to taking a virus from one place (e.g. outdoors or in one business) and likely bringing it into another, or serving as a bacterial incubator which was most-likely to screw the wearing party -- and rather unlikely to screw anyone else.  As we knew was the case in operating rooms as of 1981, forty years ago, wearing oral/nasal protection less-effective than an N95 is, at best, performative art.

Further, if you decided to tell your governor, mayor or other wagging-finger jackwad to stuff it up their ass (in other words, you knew how to read and bothered to look up the science on this for yourself) the damage accumulation, such as it was, ended when you took the mask off.

A shot, on the other hand, is designed to irrevocably change your metabolic profile -- whether for good or bad.  The intent was always to force compliance all the way back to the beginning while at the same time actively and intentionally concealing possible adverse effects.  It could never be any other way since there is no way to obtain adverse event risk data for something that frequently does not occur for months or years down the road without the passage of said time.

Trump and HHS Secretary Ash knew damn well this was the case -- as does Biden's cabinet.  Biden, himself, may not even know that he just **** his own pants, but irrespective of that as the guy in the left seat he is still responsible when the plane crashes.

There are times that such a trade-off is probably worth it even with all these unknowns.  In those cases an honest discussion with the public ought to be sufficient to convince people, and for those whom it is not, well, they choose and they accept the consequences.

But Covid-19, a virus with a similar profile of mortality and morbidity to Chicken Pox, was definitely never in that category and any claim otherwise is a damned lie.  We knew within a couple of months that a third or more of the deaths were happening in nursing homes where less than 1% of the population resides; outside of that group risk, while present, was small and certainly not worthy of fear.  Covid-19 is a beta coronavirus and two others circulate in society all the time.  One of those two almost-certainly caused a pandemic in the 1890s and today it is still here, mostly causing colds and flus.

In other words there was never any reason to believe Covid-19 would be any different either originally or down the road.  Within a couple of months -- by May 1st of 2020 -- we knew this conclusively.  In fact all we could do was make it worse by doing stupid things.

Even today, roughly two years into this virus, we cannot characterize with accuracy who is going to get butt-rammed and who is not by this virus.  There are myriad examples of elderly spousal pairs with roughly-equal morbid factors, all the way back to Diamond Princess, where one partner was killed and the other didn't even sneeze, making clear that there are risk factors we cannot accurately quantify.  We have decent statistical probability adjustments which make clear that healthy children are at a statistical zero risk of being seriously harmed or killed while obese, diabetic adults are at much higher risk -- perhaps 1,000 times as much risk.  But irrespective of said risk factors one can always draw the short straw and get hosed -- or laugh right into the face of a spewed viral cloud despite weighing 400lbs and having a blood sugar level over 200 and get away with it.

To put numbers on this related to those under 18 roughly five times as many children die every year from drowning as would die if every single kid under the age of 18 got Covid-19.  Some ten to twenty times as many children die every year in car accidents and yet unlike the risk of a car crash the risk to a child occurs once after which they obtain durable immune protection against critical or fatal outcomes in the future.  There is not now and never was any argument for trying to "shield" healthy children from this virus, whether by vaccination or otherwise.  Indeed such an act is intentional, malicious harm since we know factually that infection produces lasting immune protection from severe and fatal outcomes down the road while vaccination does not.  You're crazy to do anything that might interfere with your child acquiring said protection since down the road they may choose to get fat and diabetic and if they do having that protection via prior infection is the only thing that has a high probability of keeping them from becoming DEAD!

In my opinion anyone advocating for or attempting to "mandate" such a "vaccine" in healthy children is a murderous piece of ****.  Intentionally placing children at risk of death where no statistical benefit will accrue to them, as all children have neither the knowledge or capacity, whether mental or physical, to say "No" and enforce it, is exactly the sort of monstrous behavior that someone who forcibly rapes a child engages in and all such persons deserve the same punishment.

As for adults it's a different story.

Competent adults have the right to choose to do dangerous things and calibrate their own risk and reward.  For many years I chose to do intentional decompression diving, including in caves, which has a significant risk of death.  Indeed out of a couple of thousand people in the US who engage in this form of recreational activity several die every year, so the risk is much higher than that of car accidents -- or Covid-19.  In virtually every case when it happens the final analysis reads "death by stupidity", but dead is dead.  My daughter likes to climb things that nature has caused to stick way up out of the ground; for obvious reasons stupidity in that particular sport comes with a high risk of death as well.  I know several people who, in my opinion, drink too much.  I've known a few who have killed themselves doing so, including a member of my immediate family.  Several friends and family members, including a few who are deceased, smoke despite the well-known risks from doing so.  Engaging in certain sexual practices common to gay men is dangerous as well.  Being an adult comes with the right to make choices that one believes they will get some benefit from, whether concrete or not, and face the consequences on an individual basis of having done so.  I had no right to interfere with those who drank themselves to death and I have no right to interfere with those who consume too much booze now, just as I do not have the right to interfere with someone's decision to smoke tobacco or use some other recreational drug.  I can note that doing such a thing is dangerous and might lead to a bad outcome, including death, but that's all, and once I've noted it if I don't shut up I'm a nag, not a friend.  The same is true here; if you believe the vaccines are safe and effective have at it but I don't want to hear the crying if and when the roll comes up "1" because we had every reason to believe it damn well might and for a huge percentage of the people, a percentage that has radically increased over the last year as we have learned more, the risk-benefit equation for saying "yes" was dubious at best.  In healthy children that ratio was never justified and it has only gotten worse over time.

But if you were coerced then the person or persons who did it, which means your employer or officials at your school by the way, has earned exactly the same sentence as those who jab children at no statistical risk or sexually assault them.  Whether they'll ever get that just penalty and whether you use the guillotine on their neck or bank account depends on you.

Understand that the latest screamfest over the new "variant" is due to four people in Botswana, all vaccinated, who got..... a cold.  That's right -- none of them are in the hospital, none of them are in an ICU, none are on vents and zero died.  The same "variant" has been detected all over the place already, including in Israel and other nations, all of which previously required full vaccination to enter their countries so the premise that we could stop it from getting in by requiring vaccination by travelers is now proved on a conclusive basis to be false.

Any further insistence on vaccination to travel and otherwise enjoy ordinary life is now a damned lie proved to be of no value whatsoever to public health as the very thing we were told would not happen if people took the shots in fact did happen in a fully-vaccinated group of people.  Even if the new "variant" turns out to be wildly dangerous to vaccinated people or intentionally released and targeted at them it doesn't matter; the attempted means of stopping spread of the virus, vaccine mandates and travel restrictions for those who did not get the shots, is a proved failure.

Therefore any politician further advancing or trying to "enforce" such a thing gets to join the child rapists in terms of what they deserve as they are now trying to mandate you do a dangerous thing when the alleged social benefit they claim for it has been conclusively disproved.

Let me restate this in plain English for the idiots who have trouble with logic: Any "mandate" to take a jab is, as now proved by events, a demand that you play Russian Roulette -- a game of chance with no benefit that can and does sometimes kill you without warning.

I have the right to play Russian Roulette of my own free will and if I do, and it ends badly, that's on me.  If I'm polite I'll do it outside so its easier to clean up the mess.

But a mandate to play Russian Roulette is in fact an act of felony assault with intent to commit murder and that justifies the immediate use of whatever force is necessary to stop it by the person being coerced.

Again, I have no quarrel with people who choose the danger -- which ever way that goes (infection, prophylaxis or vaccination) for them in their own exclusive evaluation.  But any so-called "public health" argument -- that you somehow "benefit others" -- has long been extinguished by the wildly-insane commonality of vaccine failures and now, with this latest, a failure in a 100% vaccinated cohort to prevent the spread of a new variant all over the world.

Leaving aside that actual vaccines (of which these jabs are not) are and should always be about personal benefit and nothing more, evaluated on the basis of ones personal risk and health status, in this specific case the jabs have been proved to not prevent acquiring or transmitting the disease in question and thus, from a standpoint of societal benefit do nothing.

Case closed.

PS: The narrative is collapsing and so is the willingness to put up with the bull****.  Notice the hospitals who have been forced to close ERs due to firing jab-refusing nurses?  What happens when you have a heart attack and the ER is closed?  The chorus of medical folks who have had enough with the lies is also becoming louder by the day and that which was previously unknown when it comes to the risk of these jabs has without exception come up on the wrong side of the ledger.  We now have formal published medical studies showing durable harm from the jabs and the number of physicians and others speaking out on this is rising.

In addition both the 6th Circuit (which is hearing the OSHA mandate case and has not, thus far, dissolved the 5th Circuit's stay) and now the CMS Mandate, which hit health care workers, has been hit with a preliminary injunction -- which puts any medical center that fired people up to now for refusing in a very difficult spot with potential civil and, if discovery proves collusive action between medical centers then extortion is on the table which is a predicate to civil and criminal racketeering.  If you think the Biden administration doesn't at least suspect they're ****ed at this point you're dumber than you look.  This, by the way, means those who "implemented" such things ahead of the government are utterly and completely ****ed.  As in "you have a purdy house and it will soon be mine" level ****ed -- or worse.

What's even better is that by delaying the mandate dates to after the New Year Biden's Administration has admitted that there is no "emergency."  You don't let half the town burn to the ground by sitting on your ass for yet another month, right into the maw of cold and flu season, if there is an emergency with a respiratory virus.  Never mind CMS, OSHA and all the other organs of government who sat on the issue for months.  If you think the 6th Circuit won't take note of all that -- oh yes they will, and there goes the government claims.  And your employer's, by the way.

As I predicted I fully expect this pattern to continue and indeed accelerate as we go through the next few months and once it reaches critical mass there will be no stopping it.  If you're are and have been on the wrong side of this debate with regard to mandates and screaming as I have predicted for more than a year your time is about to expire and when it does all that will remain is whether you are ignored as lunatics for the rest of your life or whether the people decide that those 500,000 extra dead bodies that occurred solely due to your actions, along with all the mandated jab-related injuries, demand accountability and it will be you that sates said fury, like it or not.

Choose wisely Karen as its quite clear you are going to lose; the option to sue for peace and make penance may well have a time limit beyond which your apology and offer of restitution will not be accepted.

I for one look forward to that day for you deserve it.

It's really not very complicated: Until and unless the panic porn crap stops, on a decisive basis for several years, do not cross national boundaries.  You can get stuck there with no reasonable way forward or out that does not involve utterly ridiculous expenditure.

Generally-speaking traveling internationally, no matter the mode (e.g. including cruises) involves non-refundable expenses that you put up on a forward basis, whether it be airline tickets, hotel reservations, cruise reservations and event tickets of various sorts.  There has always been risk in this; you might break your leg, get seriously ill and not be able to travel, etc.

But Covid-19 has turned this into a minefield, with utterly no way to predict when you're going to get screwed out of your money at the demand of tin-pot jackwads like Fauci, Biden or their international equivalents with no warning or reason, when you get down to it.

If this new "variant" is such a terror then instantaneous locking of the borders is reasonable.  A several-day delay is not, which means we're talking politics here, not health.  Never mind the often-months-long planning delay involved in such trips; you plan them months or even years in advance and who knows what sort of restriction(s) will be imposed between now and then.

It's unpredictable and makes the risk of your trip being screwed -- with you eating the expense of a trip no longer able to be taken -- unacceptably high.

President ****s-his-pants put in place the "test before return" requirement to the US.  That instantly slams the door for me on all international travel because a false positive means I get to eat the cost of a quarantine in another nation plus a last-minute purchased ticket and the non-refundable original to get home.  That is an instant and arbitrarily-imposed expense of many thousands of dollars and literal imprisonment even if the positive is false.  Are you so-stupid that you will spend thousands to travel internationally complete with a risk of being effectively jailed for two weeks by your own government?

My answer is simple to the imposition of such bull****: **** everyone involved in that crap and every business that would sits back and allows it while extending their hand asking for my money and double-****, by Mr. Hands, Rochelle Walensky and Biden.

I get it: Some people and many governments are freaking out and have been for the last couple of years.  So what?  Much of this is flatly-obvious performative art, such as Biden and Fauci both "wearing masks" when the cameras are on, and not whenever they think they're off.  This isn't confined to heads of state; Pelosi was infamously caught not doing so either, as have countless other officials (e.g. Lori Lightfoot.)

Simply put Just Say No folks.

I love to travel but I refuse to go places and spend money where its not wanted and appreciated.  There are places of sanity, even in insane states such as Illinois.  Trust me on this; I've attended a few events where despite alleged "mask rules" nobody gives a wet crap and personal choice is all there was.  I've chosen to walk out of a restaurant when greeted by a person at the door in a mask with a sign on the door demanding I wear one, only to find across the street a very nice place with a gal that has an actual face and no hassles whatsoever, ala 2019.

If hotels, conveyances and attractions want my money they will cut this crap out on a durable basis, and the longer the timeline on my planning before I go do a thing the longer they will have to cut the crap before I will believe them.  For some states, such as Colorado, they're on my blackball list this season for skiing because the places I want to go are still playing the performative art game in their public-facing pronouncements and I have no way to know if they mean it.  Others, which have been barred from doing it by legislative action, are on the "open" list and I have and will redirect my dollars there.

Internationally there is no open list since Brandon -- and his cohorts elsewhere -- can change their minds as often as Brandon changes his Depends and their decisions may well cost me some or all of the funds I had planned for that trip.  If caught on the wrong side of the border when something like that happens it may well cost me thousands or more of unplanned and immediate expenditure along with forfeiting the rest of what I did plan to spend to get home.

I'm not doing it folks.  I will instead withhold my spending and redirect it where it is wanted and appreciated.  If that ruins certain businesses, so be it.  Each businessperson makes their own decisions whether to comply, resist or remove their so-called "officials".  The latter two can get quite messy and that's fine with me.  It's their responsibility to provide me with a welcoming and open atmosphere and experience, not my responsibility to comply with whatever BS they choose this day, week or month.

There is not one leisure and entertainment business that I will lift a single finger to in compliance of these measures.  None.  Ever.  Every single dollar spent in one of those establishments, and every dollar spent to get to them is discretionary and my expectations are simple: You will cut this crap out by whatever means you must or I both hope you starve to death and I will assist in that goal by withholding my funds.  The longer your BS goes on and the more-onerous it is the longer it will take for me to trust that it won't happen again, and for many firms that length of distrust will almost-certainly exceed my lifespan.