More Pain Is the Name of the Game
UPDATED: Imaginary "Antifa" threat causes vaxxers to cancel rally. Nutcase "Men" expected to show to do battle.
It’s a big week for causes putting “I’ before “We.” You know, the people who view themselves as the center of the universe; people who feel so entitled that every challenge gets blown up into a constitutional crisis. The people who view political wins not as accomplishing a goal, but rather how much pain they can inflict on those who oppose them.
On Tuesday, groups locally known variously as Let Them Breathe and Let Them Choose will be hosting a rally at the location of the San Diego Unified Board of Trustees meeting. A vaccine mandate for eligible students and staff is on the agenda. The rally is being held to oppose the very idea of insisting on people getting inoculated.
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The school board has decided that this week’s meeting will continue their practice of being held as a virtual event, with the gathering broadcast and public comment invited through zoom. Needless to say, the vaxxer crowd is taking this personally, with various leaders taking to social media to demand the school board open up their event so the public can attend in person.
Given that extremists throughout the country (including Poway) have taken public meetings hostage, refused to comply with masking/social distancing requirements, and made threats to the safety of elected officials, I’m certainly not sympathetic to any notion of letting these folks have their way.
From 3 to 5 pm, there will be a protest against a virtual meeting held outside the Board of Education Building. There is a separate call for supporters to dial in to the meeting --which starts at 5pm-- to offer commentary on the vaccine proposal.
What SDUSD Trustees will likely vote on --according to local media reports-- will be a system allowing students who opt out of vaccines to continue their education remotely. This, needless to say, will never do since the vast majority who will and/or do get vaccinated, won’t be endangered by those who don’t.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the point of right wing extremism is not creation of consensus, policy, or legislation. The pain is the point.
Aside from the generous coverage afforded by KUSI-TV, the other things to look for at this week’s school board meeting are:
Will they attempt to storm the building?
Will there be enough personal threats (which, of course, the organizers of this event know nothing about) to discourage elected officials from doing their jobs?
Speaking of KUSI, they’re giving advance publicity to the Let Them Breathe “Emergency” lawsuit seeking to end the statewide mask mandate to be heard this week in San Diego Superior Court.
The foundation of their argument is that masks do not work in reducing the spread of COVID-19; that’s just a concocted story. It is possible they might win this lawsuit at some point, not on the basis of the facts, but based on questions about whether the state has authority to create such mandates.
A CDC study co-authored by the Pima County Health Department released last Friday found that schools without mask mandates are 3.5 times more likely to experience a COVID-19 outbreak.
A study released just a few weeks ago of more than 340,000 adults across Bangladesh found that the more people wore masks, the less spread of Covid there was. Researchers from Stanford, Yale, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a large research and policy nonprofit organization that currently works in 22 countries collaborated over a period of months to collect data, which included the use of control groups, who did not wear masks.
It doesn’t matter how many studies I cite, there are a multitude of grifters and faux medical providers (since when have chiropractors become such experts on vaccines?) just waiting to be called upon to offer “testimony.”
Given the choice of these “experts” and the vast majority of medical providers, I know who I’d rely upon if I was in a serious car accident. As a cancer patient existing in a world of uncertain answers, I’d damn sure not be interested in ground up apricot pits as a path for treatment. (Remember Laetrile? Know anybody who was cured by that ‘cure?’ I don’t think so.)
Given the existence of peer-reviewed studies in real world populations saying that masks are effectively limiting the spread of the coronavirus, the real reason for this lawsuit has to do with… wait for it… the pain and suffering inflicted on other people.
It’s not the virus that haunts us now. It’s almost entirely the human response. Fix that and our suffering will subside more quickly.
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The rise of ghost guns, i.e., privately made or unserialized firearms, throughout the United States represents yet another danger to people. With 4.12 gun homicides per 100,000 people, the US ranks #1 worldwide among industrialized nations.
There is exactly zero evidence to suggest that untraceable weapons are filling a needed market niche for anybody other than those already prohibited from owning legal firearms.
From The Union-Tribune:
The number of ghost guns San Diego police seize each year has risen from a handful a few years ago to now accounting for more than 20 percent of all firearms officers confiscate, according to the department. Often, police say, the ghost guns officers confiscated were in the possession of people who had been prohibited from having firearms.
Although the action is mostly symbolic in nature, the San Diego City Council has passed and Mayor Todd Gloria has signed an ordinance making it a misdemeanor to buy, sell or possess the frame of an unfinished gun unless it has a serial number — treating the unfinished firearm part just like a completed firearm.
Hours after the ordinance --which would go into effect on October 23-- was signed, the Firearms Policy Coalition, San Diego County Gun Owners PAC and San Diego residents James Fahr, Desiree Bergman and Colin Rudolph, filed a lawsuit contending the ban violates the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding San Diegans.
“The right of individuals to self-manufacture arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes is part and parcel of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and an important front in the battle to secure fundamental rights against abusive government regulations like San Diego’s unconstitutional ban,” said Adam Kraut, FPC’s Senior Director of Legal Operations.
With nearly 400,000,000 (four hundred MILLION) legal firearms already in circulation (120.5 guns per hundred people) it certainly seems suspicious that a group would want to expand the protections of the Second Amendment* to include the manufacture of guns.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So what IS really the point here? It’s the same as it is with the vaxxers and the maskholes: pain.
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The United States had the largest year to year increase in murders from 2019 to 2020 since record keeping began in 1960, according to a report issued by the FBI as I was finishing this post.
I have no doubt the Fox News types will be falling all over themselves to blame Joe Biden and the Democrats… except that Donald J. Trump was President throughout 2020.
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