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bob_neumann

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Vaccine. Mandate.

It cost something like 15% of the nursing workforce, people who were already Covid immune, since they had worked the Covid front lines from day one.

But we pretended the vaccine helped stop the spread of Covid. It doesn't. And we pretended the vaccine had no meaningful risks. It does. And we pretended that natural (recovery) immunity didn't exist. It not only exists, but it's far stronger than anything a vaccine can do.

And yet we pretended anyway. And now we're paying the price. Pretending makes for bad public policy.

There are a lot of things we need to stop pretending about.

True story:. I'm a techie and a nerd and I've always been near the top of my class. One of the things that I enjoy is it really dry humor. And one of the ways I can get a laugh out of people is by stating something that is obvious as though I just figured it out. Or intentionally making massive understatements. Like if I just broke my arm and I would say something like, "I have found that breaking your arm is unpleasant."

When you say it around people who are generally quick witted, it takes a second for them to grok what you're saying and then they figure out that you're cracking a joke and then they smile, usually laugh.

But years ago I found myself working as an aircraft mechanic. And my cohorts whom I rode around with were very blue collar in language and culture, and several of them had been chosen as "mechanic" because they hadn't performed that well on an aptitude test.

So one day I made one of my famous observe-the-obvious funny statements, and one member of the group whom I'm pretty sure was one of the low aptitude scorers, looked at me with obvious disgust and said, "You must be one of the dumbest people I've ever met."

He didn't understand why I started howling with laughter.

How incredibly frustrating: The correlation between marriage and the general wellbeing of a middle class income is well-known. It leads folks like Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder to say, "if you want to be middle class, 1. don't have kids outside of marriage, and 2. keep some kind of full time job." Makes perfect sense to me. However, the leftist NYT, reading the same correlation, instead comes to the conclusion of, "Oh look, now those rotten rich people have even taken MARRIAGE away from the poor people!" If that ain't fake news, what is?

I find this pretty entertaining: The author laments the outcome of Brexit and Donald Trump, and points to the tech world as the source of the problem. But Facebook/Google/Apple and the rest of Silicon Valley are all in lockstep with the author. (Peter Thiel being the only exception.) So the author's problem is not that Facebook/Google created Trump or Brexit. It's that EVEN the mighty Facebook and Google couldn't stop it. It turns out the the folks in flyover country VEHEMENTLY DISAGREE with the elites in the tech sector. And these regrettable unwashed masses came out and voted. Perhaps these deplorables can be convinced of the superiority of secular humanistic socialism. Perhaps not. But blaming Facebook or Google or "Fake News" for these folks' long-held beliefs and desires is either delusion or intentional misdirection.