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I am by temperament resistant to authority, but am still left stunned by how little time it took to start building a better genocide.

An ex-Noo Yawkuh, I now live in a very blue community in a mostly libertarian state, and my younger self would have been shocked to find me grateful to have a Republican governor and developing, for the first time in my life, an appreciation for the 2nd Amendment. (Though such attestations should never be necessary, I voted for Obama twice-yes-twice, voted affirmatively for "none of the above" in 2016 and skipped 2020 altogether.)

I chose not to get vaxxed against the current Plague not out of any philosophical, religious (I ain't got no dogma) or political impetus, but for rational reasons--this thing ain't been tested long enough; dissenting scientists have been ruthlessly suppressed, which any normal person would find concerning; I've never gotten a flu shot either and consider this the same category of risk (I got the flu on my 30th birthday, lo these many decades ago, and it was a brutal week but illness gets ya like that sometimes. It's not the Crawling Eye, or something.)

And the reaction to people like me, in letters to the editor in our regional paper (where I was just one of two-count 'em two people to rationally lay out our reasons) would have made Goebbels proud. The paper's circulation encompasses two college towns and by God the intelligentsia have better pitchforks than the peasantry could dream of.

Leighton, you're one of the best essayists on meaningful subjects I've encountered. Live long and prosper.

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"Crawling Eye"...yes a favorite on Chiller Theatre...having lived in California...before NY...this weekend dose was a more visual bit of boomer paranoia (albeit produced in CA)...as a child in California...it was get under your desk drills to protect you from Russian nuclear fallout...actually could have been blowing over from Las Vegas...if the winds reversed. Living now in Italy for some 20 years...I look at the US and recall the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". From the distance...like trying to watch the daily growth of hair...the US is far down the "slippery slope"...it has not been glacial...like Moores Law...it is apparent from..."beyond the horizon". During a life of 69 planetary rotations...I have enjoyed traveling throughout this planet...observing closely different cultures and the synthesis of their rotations...sans "Chiller Theatre". Landing the first time in Moscow...I had to wonder why I had scuffed the knees of my tan Levi's delivered from Sears...just the week before in September 1960? Drip feed fear...we humans are filled with delusion, illusion, and error...isn't it so?

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February 20, 2022
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Never thought I'd live to see "do your own research" cast as a hallmark of idiocy. Remember all those practically annual MSM "exposes" of medical mistakes, which led to Congress legislating that insurance companies pay for second opinions? Boy, them was the days.

My kid received all the then-scheduled childhood vaccinations, and I was glad he'd already had chickenpox so I could avoid that then-new vax. I didn't trust Gardasil when that became available and recommended for both sexes, but I made sure my kid got the meningitis vax when heading off to college. And both of us got HepB before heading off to a sojourn in a place where that's endemic. Don't wise people think carefully about, you know, risk/benefit? Guess that was the Before Times.

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Risk/benefit analysis is no longer relevant now that we have built a blissfully risk-free society.

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Ain't it remarkable?

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