Good morning, and Happy Wednesday, C&C! Make sure you’ve blocked time to vote and have figured out who and what to vote for up and down your respective ballots. You don’t need me to tell you how important it is.

Today’s roundup includes: more celebrity SADS; CDC’s war on women continues; the U.S. is having the worst flu season in 13 years, for some reason; Supreme Court rejects mask case appeal but don’t panic; covid apology tour; and my thoughts about Professor Emily Oster’s now-infamous call for pandemic forgiveness.

🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

💉 Celebrity chef Julie Powell, 49, author of “Julie and Julia,” after finally perfecting the recipe for material success in this life, died last Wednesday, from a sudden and unexpected heart attack.

Ironically, Ms. Powell, a rabid anti-anti-vaxxer, was celebrating unvaccinated deaths just over a year ago:

We pray Ms. Powell found peace before suddenly and unexpectedly preparing her last meal.

💉 Bengals assistant defensive coordinator Adam Zimmler got sacked yesterday, by sudden, unexpected, and unknown causes. Whatever it was, it killed him. Baffling. He was tackled on life’s 38-yard line.

🔥 The Daily Mail UK ran a story yesterday headlined, “Fury as the CDC Quietly Replaces ‘Pregnant Women’ With ‘Pregnant People’ in Flu Vaccine Advice to Be Inclusive to Trans Groups.”

It’s the kind of outrageous, clickbaitey headline that makes you say to yourself, nah, they must be exaggerating or something.

Well, apparently not.

This week the CDC cleverly outflanked women again, rewriting its flu guidelines by removing or replacing the words ‘woman,’ ‘women,’ ‘she,’ ‘her,’ and ‘mother.’

For example, there used to be a section headed, “Why should pregnant women get a flu shot?” But now it says, “Why should pregnant PEOPLE get a flu shot?” And it replaced the happy advice, “mom passes antibodies onto the developing baby during her pregnancy,” with “antibodies are passed to a developing baby during pregnancy.”

In other words, they deleted “mom,” and switched to the passive tense: “antibodies ARE passed.” Passed by whom? Who cares! It’s science! Wheeeeeeeee

Ha ha, buh-bye, ladies! Women are being carefully and methodically deleted from history, faster than the speed of science.

Sorry, girls. You need to get out of progress’ way. I know it’s hard. Try to look at it from a transvestite’s point of view. Somewhere out there is a transvestite who could get the CDC flu guidance and read that “pregnant women” should still take the flu shot. Which will CRUSH his tender transvestite feelings!

What about HIM?

So, if even ONE transvestite can’t be a “pregnant woman,” then NOBODY can be be a pregnant woman. That’s fair, right? Science, shut up.

💉 Speaking of flu, the UK Daily Mail ran a story yesterday headlined, “US is suffering ‘worst flu outbreak in 13 Years’ with nearly 1million cases and 7,000 hospitalizations already, CDC report warns.”

Oops! The Mail reported that this year’s outbreak not only arrived about six weeks earlier than normal, but on top of that, is also more severe than usual.

It’s almost like our communal immune system has been suppressed somehow. The mail cites ‘experts’ who say covid restrictions, like masks and lockdowns, have left Americans with weak immunity against the flu.

Experts also warned that seemingly mild infections will be more severe this year, after two years of lockdowns and pandemic-related restrictions have left our immune systems ill-prepared to deal with common viral infections.

Thanks experts! I mean the ones who told us to wear masks and lock down. Thanks for all the extra flu and extra-weak immune systems, morons.

Fortunately, my family and I ignored the restrictions and lived mostly normally during the pandemic, apart from home-schooling the kids so they wouldn’t have to strap on face diapers every day. So.

The Mail also noted that, despite the trillions and trillions spent buying off TikTok influencers and medical professionals to push the jabs, and despite the wild success of the safe and effective covid shots, for some reason flu vaccination rates are down this year. Unironically, the article blandly says that some experts attribute lower flu vaccine uptake to “vaccine fatigue” after repeated covid shot rollouts.

Haha, vaccine fatigue. That’s a good one. I’m going to have to remember that.

😷 There was a lot of chatter yesterday about the Supreme Court’s decision to reject an appeal of a lawsuit against the TSA mask mandate, which required useless face masking on all planes, trains, and buses, right down to every single school bus.

The media chatter about the Court’s decision was universally negative and depressing, suggesting that the Supreme Court had somehow endorsed mandatory masking or something. That’s incorrect.

The Court’s refusal to hear an appeal did not create any law or precedent. The Supreme Court usually doesn’t explain why they decline a case. In this situation, it could be the Supreme Court just thinks the issue is moot, since the TSA is not currently enforcing the mandate. Why consume scarce Court resources on a case that won’t actually change anything?

In other words, while we didn’t get any final resolution from the Court, future lawsuits remain possible, if symptoms recur. It’s fine.

🔥 This next tweet is a perfect compliment to the following story about that Atlantic op-ed now taking the country by storm. Here’s what a nice lawyer said on Twitter Monday (I blurred her name since that’s not the point):

Now, I get that there are various possible takes on this, but to ME, this is a great start. This lawyer has long-since joined Team Reality, she’s not just now waking up, but her public act of contrition is helpful, not so much for her, as much as for the people who are most angry about what happened to them over the last two years.

I’m not asking you to agree with me. Just think about that while we talk about the next story.

🔥 Let’s start with ZeroHedge’s electrifying headline yesterday: “‘You Murderous Hypocrites’: Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians.”

The outrage erupted following publication of an Atlantic op-ed that ran on Monday with the headline, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” and the sub-headline, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

The well-written, lucid, and honest op-ed’s author was Professor Emily Oster, who championed masking and lockdowns early in the pandemic, often wielding “the science” as a weapon against anyone who questioned government orthodoxy. But to her credit, the mother of young children quickly came around to arguing for school re-opening, and later un-masking, and so, at various times, was criticized by both sides.

Oster began her plea for peace by giving readers a harrowing glimpse of what life inside an elite family looks like: when hiking outdoors, she taught her kids parental ‘hand signals,’ used whenever someone approached on the trail, to politely alert her kids to firmly fasten their useless cotton face masks.

Once, Oster recalled, when a little girl got “too close” to her then-4-year-old son on a bridge, the boy screamed “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

Oster now admits her son was “totally misguided,” which is a fancy, blame-dodging, elitist synonym for “wrong.” And it takes almost no effort at all to calculate where the 4-year-old got his totally misguided idea from.

Oster frankly admitted that outdoor transmission was “vanishingly rare,” and that her family’s cloth masks (made out of old bandanas) wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But, she explained, the thing was: THEY DIDN’T KNOW.

That seems to be Oster’s main point. In other words, during the fog of covid uncertainty, well-intentioned folks “on both sides” advocated for and against pandemic policies like masking, lockdowns, and so forth, sometimes hotly.

The professor explained that, in the fog of war, EVERYONE was guessing, and in hindsight, some people just got lucky with their guesses. “The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive,” she wrote. “In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.”

Then she reached her main argument, the one that put a lit match to social media’s leaky oil refinery: “We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.”

Yikes.

The reactions from many members of Team Reality were, as ZeroHedge’s headline suggested, immediate and white-hot. Many of you guys have probably already noticed the controversy, if not already dipped into the outrage pool yourselves.

The reason for the outrage, I believe, wasn’t Oster’s call for amnesty, which after all, wasn’t really asking for forgiveness, it was more like for a temporary peace. Her sin, in my view, was that she failed to address the biggest difference between what she described as the two sides, the ‘right’ side and the ‘wrong’ side.

Emily: Our side, the right side, never tried to shut your side up. Our side never tried to cancel and delete you for advocating your ‘wrong’ side. Our side never punished you for disagreeing, like by getting you fired from your job or taking you off organ transplant lists.

Emily mistakenly believes that “disagreement over policy” generated the continuing conflict. She’s totally wrong about that, and it unfortunately cratered her attempted peace deal.

The mistake that we really need to wrestle with is not that Oster and her ilk were intellectually wrong about pandemic policy. We need to deal with the sins that people — including Oster — committed against their fellow citizens who disagreed with them. It’s odd that Oster missed this critical distinction, since she began her article with that painful confession about her 4-year-old “misguidedly” yelling at a little girl.

It was the YELLING, Emily. Not the difference of opinion.

Having said all that, I agree with Emily on one point. As I wrote a couple days before she published her inflammatory op-ed, we ARE going to have to figure out how to deal with the majority of people who were wrong about pandemic restrictions. I’m talking about the majority of people who complied with the government narrative but did not cheerlead for harming those who disagreed.

See the difference? We need accountability for people who championed PUNISHMENT for those of us who turned out to be right. But people who just yelled “social distancing,” or, like the lady whose tweet I reprinted above, scolded a guy in Costo about wearing his mask, most of those people are victims of a massive government psyop campaign, too.

Just different kinds of victims.

Both Emily Oster and the lady in the tweet are now struggling with their profound embarrassment over how they mistreated individual people during the pandemic. Oster wouldn’t have started her piece talking about ridiculous hand signals and her bossy son if she weren’t feeling badly about those things.

Both Oster and the lady in the tweet eventually came around and recognized that they were wrong. And Oster is right: we DO need amnesty with THOSE folks, so that we can assemble the majority that we need to bring accountability to the smaller group of unforgivable enablers and architects of the campaign to destroy all of us who were right to resist.

That includes not just the evil pharma clowns at the top like Fauci, Collins, Bourla, and Walensky, but extends right down to local doctors and poseur scientists who sold out to big pharma and mindlessly parroted whatever they were told to say, regardless of how irrational or destructive.

At the end of the day, I think the controversy over Oster’s op-ed is a good thing. People need to vent. It’s a global conversation we need to have. Just remember, we’re going to need A LOT of those folks. It’s good to recall that many of them are victims, too.

✒️ The best refutation of Mattias Desmit’s popular theory about mass formation is that compliant people sensed, perhaps unconsciously, the danger posed by an out-of-control government, and rationally went along with the program to avoid becoming targets themselves.

In other words, they were even more terrified of what the government could do to them than they were scared of the virus. They were so terrified that they willingly lined up to be injected with a highly-questionable, unproven medication, with all its unknown and unknowable risks. Many of them — the guilty AND the innocent — are now paying dearly for that choice, in ways small, large, and darkly permanent.

I haven’t decided yet which of those two theories I favor, mass formation or rational self-interest. But I’m leaning toward people making rational, self-interested choices, maybe because my background is in economics and law, not psychology. If I’m right, Oster’s initial instinct was to protect her family from powerful, unaccountable authority by cooperating. Later, her instincts shifted to identifying that resisting the narrative protected her family better then complying.

Some of us recognized the real danger earlier than Oster. But the bottom line is, we need as many people as possible to wake up and recognize the real danger. So our rational self-interest requires that it be EASY for them to join Team Reality.

Reality isn’t an exclusive club. Just THINK about it, that’s all I’m asking.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for another terrific roundup.

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