I’m not saying this, but I might be thinking it

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I really don’t want to be a “conspiracy theorist,” but sometimes you just gotta wonder, says I. Yesterday, while searching for something else she wrote, I found a 2019 article by Bretigne Shaffer called “Is Vaccine Safety Too Dangerous for Us to Discuss?”

It begins with a description of how HuffPost had deleted a 2013 article about “a case in which the U.S. government’s Court of Federal Claims conceded that routine vaccination had aggravated a child’s underlying condition and led to that child developing ‘features of autism spectrum disorder.’” The website even deleted a link to the actual court decision.

This retraction did not occur in a vacuum. The first half of 2019 has seen a coordinated effort to scrub the Internet of any information that is critical of the claim that “vaccines are safe and effective.” The push began last fall, but gained momentum in January when the World Health Organization declared “vaccine hesitancy” to be a “global health threat,” placing it alongside Ebola, cancer, war zones, and drug-resistant pathogens.

On March 1, U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and, after stating that “there is no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases,” expressed his concern that Amazon might be allowing content with “medically inaccurate information.” He asked what action Amazon was taking to address “misinformation about vaccines.”

The thing that raised my tinfoil-hat hackles is that all this scrubbing was taking place in 2019. The article appeared Sept. 3, 2019, a couple months before news started creeping out of Wuhan, China, about a new novel coronavirus, and the rest is history.

I knew the censorship of vaccine questions was real because I have a family member whose otherwise normal child ended up on the autism spectrum not long after receiving a routine vaccination years ago. The “canceling” of my once-outspoken family member was a harsh reality long before “cancelation” was in vogue.

But I didn’t realize the crackdown had ramped up significantly the year before government took unprecedented actions to break the world economy in the name of public health, which led to the effort to shame and segregate people who hesitate to take an experimental medication that has been described as a vaccine. Even the way I phrased that description is subject to “fact-checker” smackdown.

Why was it so important that Schiff asked Amazon to self-censor its inventory and purge anything that may lead people to question whether the giant corporations that manufacture vaccines have their best interests in mind? Shaffer reports Schiff sent similar letters to Facebook and Google, and all sorts of big platforms had begun pruning vaccine “misinformation” from their sites.

When did asking questions about medical procedures and medicine become taboo? What more basic right do we have than the right to have all available information about something that’s going into our bodies, even information that self-serving manufacturers deny is true?

Apparently, it began a year or so before Big Pharma and government began putting pressure on us to get jabbed for our own good and our neighbors’ good.

Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Like I said, sometimes you just gotta wonder.

The dreams of ending roads

I needed two dreams for my subconscious to drive home the point.

A long-ago friend and I set off on a journey in an RV not unlike the one Red and I have talked about buying (or renting to see if we and the dogs like it). We are sailing through the countryside and roar up a hill. As we crest the hill, the road ends suddenly and we plummet nose-first toward the dark waters of a vast lake. I woke myself up before I could feel the impact.

I lay in the dark wondering what that dream was all about. I settled on the idea that my subconscious is worried if we buy the RV we’ll be underwater in no time. Right; back to sleep.

Now I’m heading to cover some meeting with my reporter tools. I stop for lunch and head off in the direction of the meeting site — it’s going to be in a tall building I can see rising over the trees, some distance off. I’m driving along, keeping an eye on the big building so I know I’m headed in the right direction, and suddenly the road has ended and I’m sailing through the air toward a watery marsh, and it’s pretty clear I’m about to splash, sink and drown.

It was my subconscious telling me I missed the point of the first dream. So what DID the dreams mean? Maybe it’s a reminder that we live our lives, making our plans, cruising down the road, and one day the road will just stop and the journey will end — so it’s best to concentrate mainly on what’s important along the way.

I slept peacefully the rest of the night, so I presume my subconscious felt, “mission accomplished.”

Shame on the saber rattlers

Kamila Valieva © Agenzia LiveMedia | Dreamstime.com

As athletes from around the world gather to compete in a spirit of peace and cooperation, sabers are rattling in the halls of perceived power. Oh, how weary of this dance we all are.

What a miraculous creation is the human body, which can twist and turn and run and skate with grace and skill and speed. What a despicable creation is the diseased human mind that conjures ways to penetrate and tear and explode the human body.

And for what cause? A patch of territory? A show of strength? A match of pissing? Sometimes I feel the people who built engines of mass destruction are merely itching to pull the trigger to see how well they work.

Or, even more ominous, I wonder if they wish to decrease the surplus population as a favor to those left behind after their havoc is wrought, not remembering that Scrooge was cured of his delusion that human beings may be regarded as “surplus population.”

Why are the vultures of war carrying on while the mission of peace unfolds half a world away? Why do the Powers That Be grow anxious at the sight of strong men and women competing to see who is best at games of skill and strength rather than who is best at killing and maiming?

We have more in common than differences, and that above all frightens the Powers That Be who thrive only when we clash. Shame on the saber rattlers. May they rot in their own mess and leave the rest of us to live together in peace.