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| Noah Kern, a high schooler who stepped in to work as an election judge for the March 17, 2020 primary, had no trouble wearing a mask. “Obviously, I’ve taken precautions to protect myself and others,” he said. Not so obvious to many, unfortunately. |
Say I own a fierce dog — let’s call him “Spike” — who prowls my front yard, snarling and snapping. Occasionally, Spike bounds onto the sidewalk to sink his teeth into passersby.
My neighbor suggests I put up a chain link fence. At which I scoff: “What good would that do? The gaps in a chain link are two inches across, while Spike’s teeth are an inch long, tops. The teeth will pass right through.”
Welcome to Anti-Masker Logic. As Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s statewide mask mandate takes effect Monday, there are two lines of opposition.
One is simple stubbornness. As embodied by John Catanzara, FOP president and babbling id of Red America.
After the city demanded its employees be vaccinated, he sputtered, “We don’t want to be forced to do anything!” Points for candor, and hubris, coming from a man who belongs to an organization whose members are forced to wear special hats.
The you-can’t-make-me-I-don’t-wanna approach is obviously wrong. We are forced to do all sorts of things all the time, like it or not: pay taxes, drive on the right, wear pants.
The truth is, some balk at being forced to do anything new. Even in a crisis. Even to save lives A stance so selfish that some try a second approach. They wander into the realm of science, so unfamiliar to them, and cherry pick a shiny fact to decorate their infantile “I don’t wanna!” Like a bright ornament on a dead Christmas tree.
“Do the research,” demands one reader. “Find out how large the air openings are on any mask. The ‘smallest’ openings are 3 microns. Now, even Stevie Wonder could see this coming — please tell us how a 3000 nM opening can keep out a 50 nM virus?”
Tell you how? Happily, for all the good it will do...
To continue reading, click here.
1. Cantanzara is a genuine idiot & is representative of the general intelligence & compassion of most Chicago cops. If you remember the late & very unlamented blog, Second City Cop, almost every posting was filled with the dumbest spelling mistakes & just flat out atrocious writing, that would've gotten them Fs in third grade, let alone the required college courses, Chicago cops are required to have.
ReplyDelete2. Those who refuse to get vaccinated have been indoctrinated by the worst of the worst of the US population.
For example, the ones who claim that after vaccination, they become magnetic & an ordinary spoon will stick to the point of vaccination.
One serious problem, almost all spoons are made from stainless steel, which isn't magnetic & neither are silver plated spoons, which are often a copper alloy covered in silver plate.
They also have the insane believe Bill Gates has a chip injected into them.
How? Have you seen the size of the needle used for the injection, I believe it's like 32 gauge, which is really tiny. Plus, there are between 5-10 vaccine doses in each vial, depending on the manufacturer, so exactly, how does the person filling the syringe manage to get just one chip into each injection, instead of five chips & then none for some people.
Last, the chips used to identify dogs, is the size of a large grain of rice, which certainly can't fit through the needle of the syringes used for vaccinations.
We are unfortunately, dealing with outright morons in our society at this moment, something that didn't happen in the 1950s, when I remember lining up for the polio vaccine, which everyone & I do mean everyone hailed as a flat out miracle & made Jonas Salk world famous. And he refused to patent the vaccine, saying that would be like patenting the sun!
At the risk of being contrary, "something that didn't happen in the 1950s." You're kidding me, right? Because there weren't stupid people then? Of course there were, and it did. I might have to do a column on this.
DeleteThere's an excellent article from NPR on how they got people to accept the polio vaccine, even after a couple of manufacturing mistakes, that caused some deaths & polio cases.
Deletehttps://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/03/988756973/cant-help-falling-in-love-with-a-vaccine-how-polio-campaign-beat-vaccine-hesitan
Moisture aka water droplets evaporate. Virons don't. The virons are then free to pass through the openings in the filter.
ReplyDeleteRight, and occasionally Spike jumps over the chain link fence. The fence cuts down the odds of someone getting bit. Same with a mask.
DeleteVirions can’t move independently.
DeleteAfter more than a year and a half of arranging my workouts around the weather, bundling up to run in freezing cold, etc., I gloried in the reopening of my gym. To be able to work out when I wanted was an unimaginable luxury!
ReplyDeleteWell, I had two weeks to imagine it, until this mask mandate hit.
I tried the other day to run on a treadmill in a mask, just to see if it could be done. I lasted four minutes. Just couldn't stand that flap of paper heaving in against my mouth with every deep breath.
Because my body loves to mess with my mind, after I removed the mask I completed the rest of my regular 30 minutes on the treadmill feeling great and full of energy -- a feeling I won't get to have now that I'm back to running outside.
And as I run in the extreme heat, rain, etc., I will curse with every unmasked breath the pack of idiots who are making me do this by refusing to get vaccinated. I'm almost getting to a Scrooge-like attitude towards them: Let them hurry up and die, and decrease the idiot population.
Now that hospitals are requiring all employees to be vaccinated maybe it's time for them to start turning away patients who have not been vaccinated and are sick with COVID. I'm done with these people. Every time I put my mask on now I am reminded of those selfish idiots.
ReplyDeleteReally? That's too too harsh to be believable. There are lots of selfish idiots of one sort or another out there. You couldn't kill them all even if you wanted to.
Deletejohn
Sure we can. These selfish idiots, greedheads, anti-vaxxers, and maskholes are going to start the Second American Civil War eventually. Probably sooner rather than later. What's the difference if they're killed by benign neglect instead of weapons, ammo, and related equipment? Less messy, too...
DeleteI lived through the polio epidemics and the scorching summers of the early Fifties, before air conditioning was common. When the Salk vaccine arrived, people were, for the most part, ecstatic. They couldn't wait to get their kids jabbed. If the behavior of Americans in 1955 had been the same as in 2021, there'd have been more iron lungs than Volkswagen Beetles.
What makes an anti-vaxxing maskhole what they are? It's refusing to believe that the Plague is real, mainly because nobody they know has sickened and died yet. It's treating it as a hoax and a joke. It's thinking it's no worse than the "Asian" or "Hong Kong" influenzas of the past. And for all those macho skinheaded glassbowls out there, masking up means "You're a wussy!" (excuse the typo)
As for "something that even Stevie Wonder could see coming"...the best-ever Stevie Wonder joke is as follows:
When Stevie was a guest at a Passover Seder, he was handed a large, unbroken piece of matzo from a platter. Turned it over, ran his fingertips (parts one and two) across both sides, and then exclaimed: "Wow, man! This is GREAT! Who wrote this shit?"
It's been reported that the virus killed more police officers in 2020 than all other causes combined. Yet their vaccination rate remains low. As Neil points out, there are countless regulations and uniform requirements that cops have to follow. But the ones they're anxious to fight (masks and getting the vaccine) are so obviously for their own benefit that it's pathetic. (Of all the examples he could have chosen from, our host went with being "forced to wear special hats." A classic choice from the author of Hatless Jack!)
ReplyDeleteGotta love the do-your-own-research pussies.
ReplyDeleteDo-your-own-research should be in quotes to make clear I mean the people who say that rather than those who might do it.
ReplyDelete