On the heels of Oregon governor Kate Brown encouraging people to call the police on neighbors who violate her Thanksgiving prohibitions comes another snitch-seeking measure 3,000 miles away:
Vermont governor Phil Scott wants his state’s schools to interrogate students about their Thanksgiving activities when classes resume after holiday break.
“According to Scott, students or parents who admit to violating the state’s holiday travel and gathering rules will be forced to participate in online school for two weeks, he announced via Twitter [below] on Tuesday,” reports the Federalist. “The penalty will be reduced to one week if the students in question take a COVID-19 test.”
The governor wasn’t done yet, either. He further tweeted:
As with other statist politicians — who either have an agenda or don’t know what the heck they’re doing (or both) — Scott made an oft-heard promise: COVID salvation lies right around the corner, with just the next sacrifice, really, truly (tweet below).
Where is the end of this tunnel, in 2031? Or does the tunnel grow like Pinocchio’s nose with every politician’s lie?
People aren’t just frustrated, but fed up. They should be, too, given officials’ ever-morphing prescriptions. Remember that restrictions were first supposed to be in place just for about two weeks, to “flatten the curve.”
Yet when it was clear the healthcare system wouldn’t be overwhelmed — and that models showing it would be were flawed, even those factoring in mitigation efforts — we heard Justification B. To wit: We can’t “reopen” until we have 14 straight days of declining infections.
It still wasn’t good enough when this was achieved, though, which gave us Justification C: We can’t reopen until there’s a vaccine.
But Scott’s tunnel light aside, even this has now been revised. Despite a 90-plus-percent-effective vaccine poised for introduction next month, we have Justification D: We can never return to normal. Why? Oh, just because…
It’s a COVID con, the Nigerian-prince e-mail version of an epidemiological strategy.
Unsurprisingly, while some Twitter respondents praised Scott’s leadership, others took none too kindly to his meddling (examples below).
Another respondent, replying to a Governor Scott acolyte, illustrated an inconvenient (to Big Brother) correlation:
Yet another tweeter also tried to lend some perspective:
TXMX MEMEs @TXMX_MEMEs
So will you also give a NAME to all the other deaths in VT from Non Covid reasons, as well? Car crashes, intoxication, suicide, heart attacks, depression, stroke, abortion…or is this just a political stunt? #pandering #followrealscience #notforvermonters
It’s not surprising that a respiratory disease would spike during “flu” season, and we are seeing a rise in China virus cases in most of the world. Yet is the panic warranted? As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, it’s not infection rate that matters, but the hospitalization and mortality rates.
And according to statistics here, Vermont had 85 new COVID cases, with 18 hospitalized and three in ICUs as of November 23. Moreover, this presupposes that they’re all China virus patients, even though it’s known that flu cases are often lumped in with them.
We also might ask: What does it profit a nation to gain the world but to lose its soul? Is it really worth atomizing ourselves, sacrificing our culture and time spent with loved ones, destroying businesses and lives, and causing lockdown-related death over a virus whose survival rate for those 69 and younger is 99.5 to 99.997 percent?
Many of our leaders obviously don’t think so. After all, so many violate their own preaching. The latest is Denver mayor Michael Hancock, who flew to Mississippi not an hour after warning city residents to “avoid travel, if you can.”
So it’s no wonder many people are getting fed up and are currently sending imperious politicians a message: It’s not a good idea being a big government turkey on Thanksgiving.
