With FanX (formerly Salt Lake Comic Con) coming up in a week and a half, this is normally the point at which I’d start regaling you with where my table will be in Artists Alley, what panels I’ll be on, what new art prints and originals I’ll have for sale…
However, late last week FanX announced that “regardless of vaccination status, everyone will be required to wear an approved face covering at all times while attending FanX, except while actively eating or drinking.” [emphasis in original]
FanX is being flexible with those who won’t comply and is offering refunds, and I immediately made arrangements to bump my table fee forward to the next show. Because I won’t go if masks are mandatory.
Here’s why:
I thought the whole point of vaccination was that people could finally get back to normal. I was vaccinated in April; then, in mid-August, I still caught a mild case of COVID-19 from family members (it ended up being like a five-day head cold for me). In other words, I’m vaccinated AND I’ve got natural antibodies. There is absolutely nothing that a magic face diaper can do to make me “safer” to be around.- The “approved face covering” is the same old mask you’ve seen everyone sporting for the last year and a half, the same old face diapers and designer cloth face accessories, even though research has shown that anything short of a well-fitted N95 mask really does bupkis. It’s just a breath deflector, not a protector. Viruses don’t care about “gestures,” which is all this would be.
- Despite that, those same face diapers inhibit a noticeable amount of oxygen intake for the wearer. I’m not as spry and energetic as I once was, and there’s no way I could spend 10+ hours for three days on my feet and running around the Salt Palace with decreased oxygen.
- My hearing also isn’t as acute as it once was, and there’s no way I could communicate with potential customers on the noisy sales floor with their voices muffled and their mouths invisible. (Larry Correia also announced in very few words that he wouldn’t be attending, and I’m guessing that this one is a big part of his decision; he’s got some hearing loss from decades at the gun range, and has a hard enough time carrying on a conversation on the sales floor without added hurdles.)
(When I announced in response that I wouldn’t be attending — no accusations, no opprobrium, just bowing out — some other attendee/panelist said she was glad that people like me were self-canceling, as she had an immune disorder and didn’t want to be around people like me anyway. No self-awareness that maybe the people AT RISK need to wrap up in astronaut suits and take responsibility for their own health; no, suddenly it’s necessary for the rest of us to make pointless gestures so that she “feels safe.” Gaah.)
I just wish FanX had made its announcement a week previous, before I laid out four hundred bucks for art prints and such.
Well, the next event I’m scheduled for is Anime Banzai in October… unless THEY at the last minute decide to mandate masks.
As (bad) luck would have it, just in the past couple of months I’ve removed the WooCommerce plugin from this site and let my poster listings on Etsy lapse, as the posters and prints don’t sell at all online. (The original art sketches do still sell at Etsy, fortunately.) I wonder if I’m going to have to restore all of those venues and spend more time marketing online to make up for the absence of in-person sales.
Yeah… I’m sure that’s what you thought. Here’s hoping by now you’ve figured out that’s not the outcome Fauci and his fellow tinpot despot “experts” intend for us. The only reason we in the U.S.A. aren’t already locked down again as tightly as the people in Australia and New Zealand is because we’ve still got a lot of heavily armed Second Amendment fans around here.
In a way, I suspect you’re rather fortunate: that “vaccine” you got was probably nothing more than a saline placebo both times. That means you’ve won the first two rounds of Russian Roulette this regime has been playing with you. I wouldn’t keep playing if I were you, though: even if you survive the “booster shot,” i.e. the third round, the vaxcists are clearly never willingly going to declare an end to this over-hyped “pandemic” and relinquish the “emergency” powers they’ve seized over us in its name.
One of my mottos is, “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.” I don’t doubt that the vaccines were meant and expected to be more efficacious than they have turned out to be. The fact that the efficacy has been shown to be largely temporary right at the same time when draconian measures are being deployed to ensure vaccination is, in most instances, evidence of irrationality and the belief in “the power of control” than premeditated evil, in most cases.
I also don’t doubt that I got the “real” vaccine. My wife and adult son, both unvaccinated, came down with COVID almost simultaneously (she caught it from him, he likely caught it at the cast party after the run of a play he’d been in where everyone was hugging etc.). I started showing symptoms about three days after they did, but mine was MUCH less severe — it was basically a five-day head cold. (Meanwhile my wife took over two weeks to stop having a constant fever and headache.) I think I’m on solid ground to attribute the mildness of my case to having been vaccinated, even if it was four months previous.
Boosters, though… No. “Fool me once” and all that.
When “draconian measures” include censorship and character assassination and coercion and dehumanization and murderous threats against those of us who refuse to take “the jab,” I tend to assume Hanlon’s Razor does not apply.
Also, mark my words: you will likewise be persecuted for any “booster shots” you refuse to take (and unless and until the vaxcists pushing these “draconian measures” are overthrown, there will always be another “booster shot” for you to be coerced into taking for so long as you live).
Except that I really can’t see that many of the parties going full-on fascist are not parties who could have conceivably been part of an intentional conspiracy regarding COVID’s propagation. I mean, yes, Gretchen Whitmer’s gone Absolut Mussolini, but I don’t see that somehow the Governor of Michigan was in on nefarious illuminati meetings to get the ball rolling. She just sees control (by her) as being the bestest thing ever.
I also see booster persecution and other “draconian measures” as the flailing of the control freaks as the end of their fascist Disneyland vacation starts becoming real to them. With more states enshrining freedom from masks or vaccine passports into law and fighting back at federal overreach, with the CDC’s kowtowing to teachers unions and Dr. Fauci’s documented perjury to Congress becoming common knowledge, with between 12% and 20% (depending on poll) of Biden voters regretting their vote and Larry Elder within spitting distance of the California Governor’s mansion, it seems the mini-Hitlers are realizing that their Golden Age of Control in 2020 is slipping away from them.
Well no, I don’t exactly see any one big shadowy cabal running the totalitarians’ show here either; but there wasn’t one big shadowy cabal running Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Hirohito the last time the world had so many despotic regimes either. For that matter, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (note the rather blatant attempt to be everything to everybody in that title) started out as just one band of thugs among a great many others in the Wiemar Republic, and you may recall there was also a lot of nasty infighting ending in the Night of the Long Knives before those Nazis finally unified their many corporate and political fiefdoms behind their Fuhrer. Besides, Biden reminds me a lot more of Hirohito than Hitler; Shintoism declared Emperor Hirohito a god manifest in theory, but in practice he was a figurehead with very little control over his deranged generals as they took their nation to war.
In other words, there was plenty of incompetence and infighting among the despots and localized resistance to their rule last time too, and we still ended up with World War II and the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and the Cold War. What I’m seeing now that convinces me this regime (with all of its incompetence and infighting) is being deliberately malicious like all of those regimes is how it keeps moving the goalposts to maintain its “emergency” powers:
“Two weeks until we flatten the curve!”
“Six months until we have herd immunity!”
“Stay masked and keep your distance until we get a vaccine!”
“Stay masked and keep your distance anyway; our ‘vaccine’ doesn’t actually immunize you.”
“Things won’t go back to normal until we throw Trump out and install Biden!”
“Now that we’ve installed Biden, things still won’t go back to normal until you all get jabbed twice; and keep wearing those masks anyway!”
[You and I are here.]
“You can’t do business as usual until you get a vaxport to prove you’ve been jabbed twice—and keep wearing your masks!”
“Your vaxport’s no good anymore until you get a booster shot; meanwhile, wear your masks!”
“You’ll need another booster shot; and keep wearing your masks!”
“We’re locking down again. You can’t have everything back to normal until there’s zero Covid-19 anywhere in the nation—on second thought, make that the world—which we estimate will occur on St. Nevercomes Day!”