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Posts Tagged ‘subway system’

Fear Not | UK Column

Posted by M. C. on April 5, 2021

Of course, we no longer have a king, as our ancestors wanted. We have gone a stage further. We have politicians.

Our Queen Elizabeth sits on her ancient throne, but does not reign. She might hear and see the travails of the people, but she does not speak on our behalf. She keeps the throne in being, nothing else. She refuses to fight our battles. She will not lead.

No, we have politicians now. Do you think that is better or worse?

https://www.ukcolumn.org/blogs/fear-not

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

A few days ago, I went in to a Subway sandwich shop to buy a cup of coffee. It did not go well.

“Do you have a mask?” the man behind the counter asked.

“No,” I said.

“Do you want a mask?”, he replied.

“No,” I said.

“You must wear a mask; it is the law in Scotland,” he intoned.

“No, it’s not,” I said, and I left, no longer wanting his coffee.

So what this man believed is that “The Law” could force me to cover my face: he presumably also agrees that this “law” can prevent me from seeing friends and relatives; this “law” can say who can attend a funeral; this “law” can regulate every aspect of our lives and we can only obey. Now, I stand on the law, I love the law, but I do not recognise this strange and unexplainable “law” that would oppress me and which says “You are permitted no free will”, “you must obey”, “you are a slave”.

How, ladies and gentlemen, did this happen? How did the law, which was to protect us from tyranny, become an instrument of tyranny? The answer to that question is what I want to talk to you about today. How did we get in this awful mess?

The original law, God’s law, was thundered from a mountaintop in the wilderness. Its purpose was to call a nation out of slavery — slavery to human masters and slavery to sin. In those days, that nation, called Israel, was governed by the law of God, administered by judges. They had no other form of government. No king, no parliament, no bureaucrats, no police. They needed none. They were governed by the word of God.

But our ancestors were not happy: they looked at other nations, governed by kings and tyrants and said, “We want to be like them. We want a king to judge us.” The Lord said:

They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

But, nevertheless, the Lord respected their choice. Yet he did warn them what sort of king they would have: one that would take their sons and daughters into his own service. One that would regulate and regiment the people. One that would steal from the people and hand the proceeds to his own servants. One that would take a proportion of everything they earned and hand it to another.

Does any of this sound familiar?  

But our ancestors did not listen; they said:

Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

They rejected rule by God and by God’s law, not because this made them free, but because they could not shoulder the responsibility that it places on every man and woman: to made make judgements, decisions and commitments; to stand—alone, if necessary—for the truth and for justice. They rejected God because being ruled by a man, and being told what to do, was easier. They did not want the law of God, a law that they would need to place in their hearts and to defend. Instead, they wanted a ruler to think for them and to fight their battles. Slaves they had been, and slaves they still were in their hearts.

Of course, we no longer have a king, as our ancestors wanted. We have gone a stage further. We have politicians.

Our Queen Elizabeth sits on her ancient throne, but does not reign. She might hear and see the travails of the people, but she does not speak on our behalf. She keeps the throne in being, nothing else. She refuses to fight our battles. She will not lead.

No, we have politicians now. Do you think that is better or worse? A king or queen is born into their position; they might turn out to be capable or incapable, dilettante or accomplished, harsh or gentle, merciful or vindictive. A politician, on the other hand, is selected. Chosen from a vast range of wannabes, based on their abilities. Their ability to lie convincingly and not get caught. Their willingness to steal from the people and to use the proceeds to buy loyalty from those they need. Their ability to prey on people’s fears. Their skills in the manipulation of public opinion. And their ruthlessness with former friends who stand in their way.

To these people, selected from the worst, to be the worst, we have handed over power to rule us. And worse still, we call their pronouncements and statutes “laws”. They are not laws, they are the opposite of laws. They are rules for slaves. The law is for free men and women who want to live free and be free in their hearts.

Let us look, then, at the law, as it was thundered from the mountaintop. For the most part, it states what you cannot do, not what you must do. For example:

Thou shalt not kill.

The Liverpool Care Pathway and related treatments for the elderly in the NHS are killing people, plain and simple. Drugging them, starving them and dehydrating them. It is against the law.

Matt Hancock has announced that (despite Covid travel restrictions) people can still travel abroad for assisted dying. This, too, is against the law.

Another example:

Thou shalt not steal.

There is no exemption stating “except by majority vote”.

The only positive commandment is to:

Honour thy father and thy mother.

Under Covid regulations, we are told we cannot see our father and our mother, or we must stand behind a Plexiglass screen and not hug or touch those who gave us life.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Christ was asked what is the greatest of the commandments. His reply was that:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

He then said:

And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Our politicians say we cannot love God with all of our heart and mind, for that would be offensive to some of our fellows and we will be arrested under hate-crime laws or for breaching the peace. And we cannot love our neighbours, for they may have Covid and are outside our bubble.

Our politicians take everything the law defines as righteous and make it illegal. They take everything the law prohibits and they make it either legal or compulsory. They turn white to black and black to white. How do they do this?

They use fear.

In the King James version of the Bible, there are 170 cases of mankind being instructed to “fear not”. This is not a coincidence. It recognises a plain truth of the human condition. Two failings of the human heart can be exploited to get us to commit evil acts: pride and fear. Our politicians know this well and use both, all the time.

If we remember to be neither filled with pride nor driven by fear, we become free (and we also become a threat to the system).

In the Book of Isaiah, God said:

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

And in the 23rd Psalm, the psalmist says to God:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

But our politicians say, “NO! Be afraid. The Lord cannot help you. Only adherence to OUR words and OUR laws can save you from Covid–19. To live, you must comply. To comply, you must fear. And to fear you must be faithless. So abandon God and you shall not surely die,” hisses the politician.

But we have been here before: we have a choice, we can refuse fear. We can choose the real law, the one that is based on the words “Fear not”.

The English scholastic philosopher John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English so that it could be understood by the common man and woman. In the introduction, he said:

This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people.

This was half a millennium before a blood-soaked American politician stole those words to justify an unnecessary war that had killed three quarters of a million Americans.

Wycliffe saw that when we write the law of God in our hearts, then He governs us. When this happens, then we have no need of earthly rulers, nor their phoney regulations, nor their theft, nor their fear. He also saw that God’s law, as it requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves, prohibits all forms of slavery, including that imposed by a dictatorial state, for the dictator is bound to love the humblest of his people as himself and so cannot impose any tyranny.

He saw that Christianity is in reality incompatible with the state. It is no accident that the state and its wars and oppression has grown as faith has ebbed, for:

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Wycliffe spoke against the authorities of his time; he was a maverick, a dissident. He wrote that:

I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.

Ladies and gentlemen, we should believe this too.

So what, then, is the core of our problem?

We cannot serve two masters. We must address the question “Who rules?”. Or rather, who writes the rules. Who is sovereign? Parliament has claimed sovereignty. Our Queen is called Sovereign. The People (en masse) claim sovereignty. And the individual man or woman can claim to be sovereign. All of these claims have some merit, but all lead to the place we stand today, as slaves under tyrannical rule.

We have free will: we can choose, we do not need to consent. We can turn to our Lord and say He is sovereign, we can choose His law, a law of love and a law of freedom. Freedom from sin and freedom from the oppression it generates. In doing so, we choose faith, hope and love. We reject fear and pride.

We find solid ground on which to stand as we reject the Covid scam, the global warming scam and every other state-funded boondoggle that tells us to be afraid and to yield our God-given liberty to a state that claims it will save us from our fears.

For they will no longer be our fears. We can reject them as easily as we can remove a mask and smile and talk to our neighbour.

And every smile, every caring word, every day spent living without fear is a victory!

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Lockdown Wars: Debating Pandemic Measures in a Failed State | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on May 2, 2020

People and governments always invoke the safety and security of the majority when they are taking away rights for “our own good,” just like the Patriot Act did. It’s an old playbook, joined in this century by our First Amendment nannies on social media, who electronically block efforts to organize.

The public beach versus public transportation debate came as a new study showed that NYC’s “multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator—if not the principal transmission vehicle—of coronavirus infection,” seeding the virus throughout the city.

A Stanford doctor nails it: “Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals, and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/lockdown-wars-debating-pandemic-measures-in-a-failed-state/

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Lockdown Wars: Debating Pandemic Measures in a Failed State

If you thought COVID-19 wouldn’t get political, think again.

 

Peter Van Buren

If America has a fast forward button on it, someone should push it ahead to November. We won’t be done with the virus until we’re done with the election. Between prudence and overreaction lies politics.

We bleat about wanting decisions to be based on science, then we do the same dumb red-blue thing, even counting the corona dead differently (nothing left certain but taxes now) to make the numbers seem better or worse depending on shifty politics. Something that should not be about Trump at all is All About Trump.

It’s killing us. There is no other country in the world so driven by a politics so devoid of science. Other countries have good leaders, some not so good. But look at us. Our nation is held hostage to protests and counter-protests, lockdowns and open bowling alleys. There is no other nation where so many are convinced their leader is actively trying to kill them, even imagining he wants them to drink bleach.

The MSM portrays protesters against government restrictions as Trump death cultists who’d rather end up in an ICU than skip a haircut. Such flippancy insults the righteous anger over lost livelihoods. It is an echo of the things that lost 2016 for the Democrats. The people don’t want haircuts. They want to feed their families. They want thought-out targeted restrictions instead of politically driven overreaction and fearmongering. It’s about deep emotional waters, sense of self, a whole lot more than just how the economy will help Trump win or lose. Many also are concerned that their rights, including to assemble, to worship, and to protest, are being controlled by leaders they don’t trust while a media they abandoned years ago mocks them. Beachgoers in a red state are #FloridaMorons; in a blue state it’s #SurfsUp.

But they see this time the Brooklyn elites are going a step further, beyond the deplorable label, to wishing them to catch the virus, figuring the infection will teach them a lesson before they vote wrong again. Wishing death on people you disagree with.

Elsewhere, medical professionals say the protesters have no right to put others’ lives at risk, and think it’s more than OK to physically stop the rallies. That’s called “the heckler’s veto” by the Supreme Court and is not allowed under the First Amendment, whether you’re a hero ER nurse or an abortion protester blocking the door to a clinic. Stopping someone from protesting by shouting them down, driving a car into their crowd, or otherwise trying to interfere with them exercising their rights (including the right to hold a dumb opinion or one you disagree with) is disdainful and unconstitutional.

The medical professionals and their Muppet chorus of journalists sound like some soldiers who felt their sacrifice was made cheap by people who protested the war. Thank you for your service. It does not, however, allow you to choose which people can exercise their rights. When you choose to serve you serve those you don’t define as worthy as well as those you do. It’s bigger than you, doc.

People and governments always invoke the safety and security of the majority when they are taking away rights for “our own good,” just like the Patriot Act did. It’s an old playbook, joined in this century by our First Amendment nannies on social media, who electronically block efforts to organize. If you’re screeching about how rights don’t matter when lives are at stake, you’ve got company. The KKK used that argument to block black people from marching, claiming it was a safety issue. Yet California will no longer issue permits for anti-lockdown protests at any state properties, including the Capitol.

Agree? Just remember what you’re saying now about these redneck inbred gun nuts the next time someone claims a march permit can’t be issued in the interest of public safety to a group you support. It’s the same thing, rights are rights. Because you know what else can spread rapidly if “left unchecked?” Tyranny. Justice Louis Brandeis held free speech is not an abstract virtue but a key element of a democratic society. He ruled even speech likely to result in “violence or in destruction of property is not enough to justify its suppression.” In braver times when Americans challenged the safety vs. liberty argument, the Supreme Court consistently ruled in favor of free speech, reminding us democracy comes with risk. But that was another world ago, before we measured human worth in RTs.

There is science which should be informing decisions. But while claiming a small rally in Denver will cost lives, or Florida will kill people by opening its beaches, the same voices remain silent as NYC keeps its subway running 24/7. The public beach versus public transportation debate came as a new study showed that NYC’s “multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator—if not the principal transmission vehicle—of coronavirus infection,” seeding the virus throughout the city. Without a superspreader like the subway it can be contained locally. It is tragic when the virus rips through a nursing home or meatpacking plant (it is a virus after all, it will go viral), but all of those together barely touch a week’s body count in New York. Shut down mass transport.

We can put most people back to work with limited risk; the protesters are right. The virus kills a very specific patient. About half the dead are over age 65. Less than one percent of deaths are under age 44. Almost 94 percent of the dead in any age group had serious underlying medical issues (about half had hypertension and/or were obese, a third had lung problems). The death toll in NY/NJ under total lockdown: over 27,000. Death toll in much more densely populated Tokyo with “smart” lockdown: 98.

About 22 percent of New Yorkers already have the virus antibody and thus expected immunity. One logical implication of this—that large numbers already have or had the virus, and that it is harmless to them—is simply ignored. Quarantine/social distancing should be for those most vulnerable so we can stop wrecking all of society with cruder measures. Hospitals should separate patients by age. No need to keep kids from school, especially if that means isolating them inside a multigenerational household. Let them wear soggy paper masks to class, even tin foil on their heads, if it makes things easier. Online classes are lame and America doesn’t need a new generation dumber than the current one.

The New York-New Jersey area, with roughly half the dead for the entire nation, practices full-on social distancing while Georgia was one of the last states to implement a weaker stay-at-home policy. Yet as Georgia re-opens, the NY/NJ death count is over 27,000. Georgia is 892. NYC alone continues adding around 500 bodies to the pile every day, even with its bowling alleys closed.

We judge risk versus gain for every other cause of death. We wear condoms. We watch our diets. Time to do the same for the virus. As for lockdowns, we may not even be judging them accurately. Some 22 states have had fewer than 100 deaths. Only 15 states had total deaths for the entire duration of the crisis higher than NYC’s current 500 a day. The original goal of lockdowns, to buy time for the health care system (and most resources were never needed due to over-estimates of the viral impact), has passed. If the new goal is Virus Zero it will never come. If the real goal is to harm Trump we’ll have to put up with this without serious discussion until November.

A Stanford doctor nails it: “Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals, and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation.”

We are fretting and frittering away our national muscle watching TV about a bigamous tiger keeper. There are too many who want this isolation to continue indefinitely, a pathetic nation whose primary industries for its young people are camming and GoFundMe. Politics focuses on viral deaths, but the Reaper keeps a more accurate tally: deaths from despair, from hunger (two million new people became food insecure in NYC since the virus), financial losses (26 million Americans have filed for unemployment), mental health issues, and abuse (domestic murders during the viral months in NYC  outstripped the total from 2019). In some ultimate irony, parents are postponing standard childhood vaccinations for fear of bringing their kids to medical facilities.

It is the reaction to the pandemic that exhausts us, not the pandemic itself. So when someone claims it is Money vs. Life they miss the real answer: It’s both. It should not be taboo to discuss this.

Be seeing you

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