Dakota Beacon

In a recent load of specious offal (“Masks are about public health”, Grand Forks Herald, July 25, 2020), one Jim Shaw clangs the same old tedious alarm bells most of us wish we could hit snooze on.  We’ve all heard these alarms.  As the “pandemic” is winding down, as weekly deaths are decreasing, these alarms are sounding with increasing urgency.  “New coronavirus cases are ‘soaring’ throughout the U.S.”,  “... North Dakota hits record high for active cases…” How ‘bout this humdinger:  “The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population, but an astounding 26% of the world’s coronavirus cases.”  Statistics are slippery things.  For example, I could tell you that the U.S. ranks 4th among “affected” nations in COVID testing over population.  Or I could tell you we rank 17th among those tested who tested positive.  These authorities are both on the net.  Wikipedia gives us positive cases over total tested cases; Statista.com gives us tests over total population.)  The take-away is that we simply don’t know how many COVID cases are out there, because data-gathering is so inconsistent.  Shaw is dissimulating.

For more proof, consider this:

“All we have to do is look to our neighbors to the north to see the difference tighter restrictions can make.  Manitoba, which has about twice the population of North Dakota, has had 366 cases and seven deaths.  North Dakota has had more than 5,300 cases and 96 deaths.”

Hmmm!  According to the Winnipeg Free Press, as of two days after Shaw’s moralistic injunction, Winnipeg still hasn’t enforced masks!  I don’t know what “tighter restrictions” Mr. Shaw is talking about.  Maybe he’s into bondage.  But he sure doesn’t mean masks, which begs the opposite argument:  If Manitoba has done so stunningly well without masks, why should we wear them?

Shaw is lying to you.  He harangues “. . . new coronavirus cases are soaring throughout the U.S. . . . North Dakota is hitting record highs for active cases . . .”  Of course we are.  We’re testing more.  Let’s look at the CDC's own record, shall we?  According to that dubious agency, “Deaths involving Covid-19 and Pneumonia Excluding Influenza” is 34!  The number he chose (96) was THIS:  “. . . the number of deaths for all causes for this week in 2020 compared to the average number across the same week in 2017 - 2019”.  Not COVID deaths!  All this is without considering the reliability of the testing itself or the integrity of those performing the tests.  And don’t forget: a case is not the same thing as a hospitalization.

As to the efficacy of masks in stopping the spread of the virus, the science is not settled.  A few months ago the Surgeon General was calling us idiots for wearing them.  If he was wrong then, why should we believe the CDC now?  Is a “scientist”more credible merely because he takes a government paycheck?

What about the health risks involved in wearing them?  For all the hysteria around the coronavirus, no one in government has given any regard to adverse effects of prolonged us of a mask.  Reduced oxygen in the blood and carbon dioxide trapped in the respiratory and central nervous systems will be shown, after it is too late, to have caused or exacerbated everything from heart disease to lung disorders to pregnancy issues.  In one single day I encountered two women who will be detrimentally impacted by the mask mandate, one of them with COPD and one of them carrying a child.  

Shaw is right about one thing:  Not wearing masks is selfish.  What dime-store totalitarians like him don't want you to think about is that you have  a right to pursue your own self-interest, and moreover, to arrive at your own decisions through your own reason, and to discover information with or without the approval of the CDC, the WHO, the NIH or any of the lot of them.

Jim Shaw will have you believe otherwise.  Read carefully his chilling penultimate paragraph.  According to him, governments have the right “in the name of public safety” to tell you what to wear, where you may or may not go, with whom you may or may not congregate, what you may or may not say, how high to jump, anything they feel like.  He has as much as told you he will endorse mandatory vaccinations.  His own words convict him of that charge. 

Shaw has a chimpanzee’s conception of rights and a snake-oil peddler’s understanding of the importance of magic words.  There are village in Mali where slavery has been practiced from time immemorial.  The higher caste simply expects members of the lower caste to work for them for no pay.  Jim Shaw has the heart of one of those villagers.  What gives the higher caste the right to control the lower caste?  Nothing more than that’s the way things are done there.

But “please don’t say you are losing your freedom if you’re mandated to wear a mask.”   

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