PS: Regarding your last (Toronto Star article) link, Mr. Smith, Dr. Jennifer Kwan, a family physician based in Burlington, Ont, is very easy on the eyes. I'm not sure how easy it'd be for her to have a child at this point, what with all the jabs she could get.

PS: One Moar...
https://archive.ph/HdQBT
☮️

PS: August 11, 2021
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https://tinyurl.com/bdcwvzwb
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqxYqc6ipU0
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https://i.ibb.co/1Yf0WLcv/This-Matters.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/gZ6tbXsG/Pink-robots-are-delivering-your-food-What-does-this-mean-for-local-gig-workers.jpg
⭐
https://archive.ph/kS53c
https://tinyurl.com/pdxhfdrn
https://tinyurl.com/nap9v8db
⭐
☮️
⭐

PS: Mr. Anderson, I don't want to get too specific, but, no, the Dead didn't play anywhere in close proximity to me that whole year of 1977, not that I would have been allowed to go, no matter if it were on the next block!

Ahhh, well.

Mr. Smith, I thought I was looking at a new Daily Stupid broadsheet (whatever a broadsheet is) from you, but then, we don't operate out of Toronto. (Except when seeing Falun Gong parades.)

I'll check out your other links. Have a nice evening - the tariffs are important, but it's not like we - including the estimable Truth Vigilante on TUR - can do anything about it all. That book is pretty good. Thanks!

PS: Good afternoon, everyone!

https://i.ibb.co/21scsmVk/Quarantine-Camp-Escape.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/tmKrcrk/20-Percent.jpg

I used to think some people were stupid and some people were evil. Then the KungFlu PanicFest hysteria hit...

I now realize that ~75% of the people are massively retarded and will do anything that the TV tells them to and many of those same people are evil and will gleefully lash out at officially approved scapegoats.

https://i.ibb.co/w8X3Gw8/Toronto-Star.jpg

Interesting times.

(Hey Achmed, I'm still going to reply to your tariff question under poast 3208. I didn't do so sooner because I just wasn't sure how I felt about Trump's tariffs so I had to re-read some chapters in the wealth of nations and some other stuff to wrap my head around my response. Won't be real soon though because it is beautiful here and I'm going to go plant some lettuce and some other stuff then sit on the porch with my girls.)

I hope everyone has a wonderful evening! ☮️

PS: "This sudden revolution towards such a dark direction was borne of the basic mass-delusion that was "Covid" in the first place. It was, or would have been, the adoption of a PRC-China-style system of mass surveillance and onerous restrictions systematized forever."

That's what I was most worried about. This thing was, or could have been for some, an excuse for all kinds of bad things. Defeating Trump, staving off a financial crises (temporarily) by printing up $4 Trillion, as per Adam Smith, ... there are plenty of others. I indeed hated the excuse for prohibiting the use of cash and then the Orwellian QR code stuff.

On the humorous side, re the Vaccine Passports: We have it pretty good in our State - not to many politicians or regular people are so intense. However, we thought about a trip overseas in Winter '21-'22 when those things were often required or rumored to be. This place is a 2 1/2 World country. I know a lady who travels a whole lot and had just gotten back from there. "Hey, do you need those vax passports or anything?" "Yeah, they ask for that." "Would a quick Photoshop job do?" "Yeah, no problem." As it turned out, we couldn't go anyway, but also I don't have Photoshop, just MS-Paint. I'm pretty sure I could have made it work.

PS: I just watched the 1st installment of "Follow the Science", Mr. Hail, that is, after I read most of Chapter 4 on the Hawley-Smoot* tariff's effect on about nothing, in the .pdf of Alfred Eches' "Opening America's Markets". (Thanks, the both of you for saving me effort. Also, I read the HuffPo article. Never thought I'd say THAT!)

Anyway, as for the video, well, you'd expect this, I'm sure, but it was a bit blackety-black and diverse - not just the one guy. I was about to say "He's a good speaker and all, but I wouldn't want him teaching my kid science." (Possibly 2 reasons.). Really, from installment 1, you can't tell for sure which side he's on, especially from that ending scene. He seems neutral. I'm glad to here of this guy's public brave (I mean, New York City, please!) anti-panic stance. Since I read that from you after viewing the video, I appreciate the video and the man more now.


* The author has a whole page about why the tariff should be called with the Congressman's name before the Senator and why an exception here is warranted... geeeze!

PS: OK, I will have to go back and see if the Dead played anywhere near me on that tour, Mr. Anderson. I don't think so, and even if they had, there's no way my parents would have let me go. #SAD!

However, thanks to the internet, as you mention, I don't have to listen to 5th generation tapes. (I had a bunch of good ones stolen years ago - 3rd Gen ones from some early 1980s shows - stolen along with the case of 30 cassette tapes and my film camera.)

PS
In the completely off topic department:

Today , tomorrow and Thursday marks the 48th anniversary of a three night run that the Grateful Dead played at Winterland in San Francisco. The Sunday night show 3/20/77, was the greatest Dead show I ever saw in person. Of particular interest to you, Mr. Moderator, was the double encore: Terrapin Station, which was brand spanking new in the spring of 1977, followed by… you guessed it, US Blues. My buddies and I went to the Friday and Sunday shows, but missed Saturday as we went to a French restaurant for dinner ,which was a great experience in its own right. All three shows are available on the Internet Archive.

PS: Thank you so much, Mr. Hail. I am looking forward to seeing this, but... I'd better get into that Great Depression/Smoot-Hawley business from the
Echies (?) book Mr. Smith linked us to and your direction to that specific chapter. I want to take advantage of the help from both of you to reply to ... yes, I know! Make it stop! ;-}

PS

Does anyone know about this:

https://FollowTheScienceSeries.com

A documentary. It's called "Follow The Science, The Series." To be released, as a six-part documentary about the Panic, from an Anti-Panic perspective. They've been preparing this for some time. Parts 1 and 2 are out and others are to follow, it seems along an arc aligned with some of the key events of the success and victory of the Panic back in 2020.

Here is Part 1, a short one only 20mins in length:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/1066188419

____________

They have produced an excellent professional-quality documentary here, featuring many of the standout "Anti-Panickers" of 2020-2021. This is right up Peak Stupidity's alley. The annals of history will show that Peak Stupidity was among the Anti-Panic voices when it mattered most.

What I like about "Follow the Science: The Series" and the way the director made it, is that it makes use of multiple layers. It is not one single narrative that walks through one perspective as in someone telling a story around a campfire. It uses different layers. One layer makes use of real footage from 2020, in a way exactly like you'd see in a second-rate disaster movie. Such sequences were common features of these movies between maybe the 1990s and 2010s. The way this is shown is a subtle signal that the whole thing shows definite similarities with a fictional Panic narrative-movie.

The Corona-Panic was, in a way, life imitating art. Many of us observed that in 2020. This documentary reinforces that without beating people over the head with it.

Many of the better-thought-out "zombie" movies were a good template for what the Corona-Panic was. People were primed to go along with the Panic because most people had seen movies or tv shows or novels that seemed remarkably similar, and finally it had finally come to the real world, this prophecies from the holy writ of producers of zombie movies. That, plus the huge mystique of the Internet and the the problem of mass-addiction to "devices" which totally transformed info-streams between ca.2005 and ca.2020. Socially or culturally we'd clearly not yet adapted by 2020 to the revolution in info-delivery (nor have we done so by 2025).

It's the most-trivial (and very true) observation of all, about the Panic, that it would've been impossible and absurd in the era before the Internet and the redesigned info-space, info-delivery system involving zapped "updates" to devices that always surround people. The CoronaPanic-like hysteria or mass-delusion of 2020 could not have sustained if reliant on people reading updates in paper newspaper which they either get delivered once a day to their homes, buy at news-stands, or buy from a wandering seller of papers who shouts "Extra! Extra!"

Back to the "Follow the Science" documentary: I said that "one layer" of the documentary makes use of stock footage that almost re-creates the feel of many fictional virus-pandemic movies, horror movies, zombie movies (zombie-ification often coming from a virus, in these scripts, often coming through a transmissible virus). This is not the only layer. There is also a framing "layer" of the documentary by the host(s) who say they'll guide us through the Panuc, and a semi-separate layer involving actors re-creating typical scenes of the Panic. What was it, how did it happen, and why. We are analyzing something at arm's length most of the time, through one layer or another. There is a considerably light touch to several of the layers that has a tone that contrasts with the absurdities of the 2020 Virus Drumbeating footage.

The main host, a Black guy named Clifton Duncan, was a Broadway actor. He doesn't say so in Episode 1 (see link) but this man gained fame in 2020 after being banned indefinitely from Broadway. The reason for his ban was his repeated speaking out against the restrictions and being seen as a source of trouble and liability for refusing to be a team-player and refusing the vaccines.

It's an ironic touch that revisiting the nightmare-like Corona-Panic, especially at its worst in 2020, would be led by an actor, given all of the Panic's similarities to fiction and the zombie-movie genre or similar movies. The man Clifton Duncan himself exists on several layers well beyond neutral voice of the host of the documentary. He is a stage-actor who became a real-world actor in the realm of Virus Politics. He became an Anti-Panic activist, it seems, in the course of the year 2021. He had some degree of profile on the "scene" by about October and November 2021, by which time he had been banned from Broadway for refusing the vaccines and other restrictions, and subsequently his industry-wide ban was maintained (he was "blacklisted," at least according to his account). Clifton Duncan appeared on the libertarian Tom Woods Show in mid-November 2021, for example. Tom Woods being a voice against the Panic consistently beginning about late March or early April 2020.

Documentary host Clifton Duncan's serious entry into the fray, in late 2021, may seem "late in the game." (As often the case, few remember the earliest people on a scene, including the very-early hardline anti-Panic voices. My own favorite, the eccentric Dr Knut Wittknowski, by his silence over the past few years shows his unwillingness to ride the thing into popularity or "cash in" on it; he appeared as a prophet in those early months of 2020, and was right when no one else was willing to be right.)

At the cusp of winter 2021-22, it may today be forgotten just how much of a NEED there was to fight the still-strong forces of the Panic, head-on. The Anti-Panic side was determined, morally right, and factually right, but also demoralized because of a repeated string of defeats. The mandates and restrictions were fully in place and major political will was locked in, internationally and by the big-blundering behemoth of the USA by then under Biden. The consensus seemed to be to continue the measures indefinitely: Anti-Panickers, non-compliers, and vaccine-decliners were very much being forced out of life, shamed, fired, banned, blocked. Travel was difficult-to-impossible. Regular social dynamics were hobbled or severed entirely, with shabby and ridiculous simulacrums attempting to take their place. The Internet gobbled up more attention than ever.

The Corona-Panic was in a certain respect a revolution in Internetificaiton/digitalization of "normal life," which had largely occurred already at a steady pace in the 2000s and 2010s, but within an 18-month period, or so, between spring 2020 and fall 2021, had dug in hard and completely reoriented the way people did things. Thousands of words could be written easily on these changes, and Peak Stupidity has documented some of them along the way. (One change that troubled me, for various reasons, was the rise of QR codes to do basic things, often with no option other than the QR code. How many restaurants removed paper menus and forced customers to look at food and prices via the Internet via a QR code?)

Untold social damage continued to occur all throughout the Corona-Panic period, and not just at its worst ("lockdown") points but all throughout, lingering even well after the lifting of the restrictions ca. early-spring 2022. Non-systematic thinkers, I think, generally never fully appreciated the degree of social-cultural-institutional DAMAGE being done. In retrospect, looking back from 2025 or 2030, or 2050, or later, these people and others not yet born or too young to have appreciated the catastrophe as it was happening, may well still will have a hard time "getting it."

Back then in winter 2021-22, I remind you that we were at the cusp of a system of "vaccine-passports." Of course, as usual, enforced by smartphone. Sometimes called by names such as the "Green Pass" n Europe, an international agreement was possibly; and made national regimes imposed versions of them domestically. Under that system, which was largely in place in certain areas even in the USA for a year or more, individuals could do things ONLY if plugged into an app and mega-database with pre-approval from Central Authorities.

The entire Covid-Panic-restriction regime, and the proposed vaccine-passport system specifically, were as a sudden collapse in the Western-liberal tradition of openness, of privacy and liberty to choose one's own way, and I'd say of a default to social magnanimity (rather than enforced behaviors as by religious edict or tight regime control on behavior). This sudden revolution towards such a dark direction was borne of the basic mass-delusion that was "Covid" in the first place. It was, or would have been, the adoption of a PRC-China-style system of mass surveillance and onerous restrictions systematized forever. The delusion, hysteria, and panic of 2020 is far-and-away, in my view, the biggest "issue" of the 2020s, and it's a shame it is so-seldom talked about anymore.

The defeat and unraveling of the Panic, we will remembered, occurred back there in the first few months of 2022. Those were the critical months in the West, as the Panic was at its two-month mark. (See my "Scenes from the 'Defeat the Mandates' rally, Washington D.C., Jan. 23, 2022, and thoughts on its place in Corona-Panic history" published in late-February 2022).

By a point not-too-distant from those critical days of early 2022 -- by say, spring 2023 already -- the whole thing had been forgotten! Few talked about it anymore. No one wanted to revisit the thing. Simplified narratives, which "let everyone off," were prevailing by default. It's true that the occasional contrarian commentary popped up, such as the latest one from Zanek Tufekci ("We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives," New York Times, March 16, 2025). But these were not ultimately very important, as the center adjusted towards almost a conspiracy-of-silence direction. It was probably because so many people were embarrassed by the whole thing. You'd hear them say they were fatigued by it, maybe.

In 2023 and 2024, things faded into default-received-wisdom, propped up by not really being evaluated, to this effect: the Panickers were right, basically; the Lockdowns, masks, and experimental vaccines saved the world, basically. They'd concede a point here and a point there, but at core the Panic-narrative held.

With the restrictions themselves all gone by 2023 (even one of the main villains of this story, PRC-China, removed the core components of its onerous Virus-restriction regime in winter 2022-23, after the "White Sheet of Paper Protest Movement" that spooked the CCP in November 2022. The energy of the Anti-Panic side greatly faded, and was
in the Est already down to minimal levels when the late-coming protests by the cowed-and-cowardly Chinese hit the news in November 2022.

The Covid Anti-Panic movement, as a social movement, faded because its goals were achieved. By the time attention shifted to the 2024 presidential election -- the campaign for the Republican nomination that began in earnest by about late-summer 2023 and continued into early 2024, and then the general-election campaign against Biden/Kamala in mid-late 2024 -- I recall almost NO ONE even talking about this horrific Corona-Panic. It was then of so-recent memory. But we got largely silence on the matter. The reasons in this case: Short memories, social-scale embarrassment, but also demgagogic tendencies and Trump's own moral unseriousness ("it's all about him" applying). The latter combined with Trump's own personality-cult, and huge numbers of his core supporters were not willing to break with him over his own bungled and weak leadership during the crisis. By late 2023, political consultants felt the Anti-Panic line was not a winner with the median "swing" voter. Even Ron DeSantis was persuaded to largely drop it.

It was exactly in that environment -- the fading-out of the memory and power of the Anti-Panic movement -- that the idea for this "Follow the Science" documentary-series was proposed and pursued. The results seem quite good. At least from what I see of Episode 1. In other words, there is reason to support this project for reaching persuadable people:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/1066188419

https://followthescienceseries.com/

There is a pay-wall to the other parts besides Part 1, for now. I'd hope something like this would eventually be released widely, at the least onto large "streaming" platforms (e.g., Netflix; although I'd say it's regretful that so many people seek out and get info that way, there is no denying Netflix's power in the 2020s).