Darrell Ehrlick lectures us on masks and vaccines

Please note well: I should report at the beginning here that our writer Stephers, currently inundated in flood waters, has a much better and deeper view of Covid vaccines, leading one to suspect they are not in fact vaccines, but rather gene modifiers. Graphene oxide has been found in them, she writes and backs with evidence. Somehow 5 and 6G is a tie-in. I lack her abilities in that area. I urge you to read her posts to get a broader view.  Here I wrote about the vaccine as if it were a real vaccine, and by no means did I mean to sell her work short. I am a creature of habit.

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I refer you to this post by Darrel Ehrlick, who was once the editor of the Billings Gazette, a longstanding Montana newspaper in what was once the state’s largest city. Travis Mateer, aka the poet William Skink, brought my attention to Ehrlick with this post, kind of a rant. I did my own rant in the comments. There I mentioned an interview I had heard, a comedian whose name I did not catch. As I posted,

[The comedian] talked about being in college, pre-med, when he realized he was funny and that comedy was his real calling. He wanted a degree, and so asked his advisor about what would be the quickest and easiest way out of college. He was advised to switch to journalism.

I then go on to refer to Dunning-Kruger, the study wherein it was determined that people of low intellectual ability are not capable of realizing their own intellectual shortcomings due to … low intellectual ability.

I have no doubt that Ehrlick’s office is  lined with diplomas and honors, maybe awards. As professions go, journalism is perhaps the least self-aware, and also one that hands out awards to one another like Halloween candy. It is also a very smug profession, and as we all know, smugness, while annoying, is also a defense mechanism used to hide deep insecurity. On some level, do journalists suspect they are frauds?

I want to examine several sentences in the Ehrlick piece, and will not be handing out awards.

[Montana Governor Greg] Gianforte went a step farther to cause confusion and sow mistrust of masking in schools even though the vaccine hasn’t been approved for young children, and despite the rise in COVID-19-related illness in youth. Face coverings are among the only defenses available to that age group during these times of kamikaze politics.

I don’t know what he means by “COVID-19 related illness” in youth. The survival rate among youth for this interesting disease that has no unique symptoms and no reliable test for diagnosis is something like 99.99%. The “defense” of face covering is harmful to children, limiting their oxygen intake, slowing down brain functioning. (Will we be overrun by journalists in the future, a side effect of masks? Oxygen-deprived high school students stumbling about looking for a profession at which they can excel, but which does not tax their brains?)

Ehrlick just doesn’t know what he is talking about. That’s all I can make of it. We watched a video (linked here, skip ahead to minute 29:00) where at the outset a person noted that in this debate, facts do not matter. That is because we have been in a sealed room and fed agitation propaganda for many months, keeping us in isolation and a state of fear. In that state, we cannot reason properly … due to brain fog and fatigue.

Now, our own thing seems to have transformed into a selfish ethic of my freedom at all costs, even at the expense of life or the lives of those around me. Forgive me if the next time I hear someone tearfully talking about the sanctity of life I roll my eyes.

For a newspaper editor not to have inquired into the nature of “testing positive” and “asymptomatic carrier” and “dying with Covid” is … well … just how journalists operate. They just blindly report. They base all their opinions and “facts” on “experts”, and do not know how to think independently. I roll my eyes. (“American college students are like American colleges — each has half-dulled faculties” – James Thurber .)

And as much as I want to think kindly about this state I love, the historian in me got to wondering how the state would have responded to such a pandemic years ago. We have some clues: During the Spanish flu epidemic of 100 years ago, people masked up and prayed for relief. When the polio vaccine was available, pictures show long lines of Montana schoolchildren eagerly taking what was then a new vaccine, not so unlike the newer mRNA technology of today.

He has his facts wrong. It may well be that people wore masks in hospitals and infirmaries, but otherwise the Spanish flu, never shown to even be contagious (see Rosenau experiments) was a human tragedy not well understood to this day. Sailors out to sea during the breakout of the pandemic still came down with it at sea. The fact that it coincided with the First World War, where gases and other poisons were widely used, where soldiers lived in fetid swamps, has never been studied. The fact that most victims were young adults … never studied. (They say they came across a virus, H1N1, in a cadaver, and that it therefore was the cause. People jumped on that bandwagon. I doubt they found anything, as virologists don’t actually isolate viruses. Also, one cadaver proves nothing.)

At least with polio, we now know its true cause, lead aresenate and DDT, spread on crops to destroy pests, and which made its way through the lower intestine and attached to the base of the spines of young children. It is still with us, now called acute flaccid paralysis, identical symptoms. We also know the vaccine arrived too late to be the cause of the end of the spread of that disease. That’s just a fancy lie.

And so I look to the past to give guidance on the future. And while every generation sees itself living in precarious times with epic consequences, I struggle to find an appropriate analogue. If history really was repeating itself, then kids should be lining up for vaccines as soon as they’re available and so should adults. The community would trust science and be grateful for the amazing accomplishment of developing a vaccine and then getting it to the public so quickly. That’s what history tells us has happened previously.

If you don’t look at that paragraph and see the words of a very credulous man, highly susceptible to propaganda and unable to think for himself, then look again. The key words are there. Anyway, enough of Darrell Ehrlick.

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I am going to repeat something here, but in my own words, as I’ve long since lost the file where I kept the original. It was written by Ben Bagdikian, a noted journalism critic, and if I find the original, I will substitute it for what is written below. It is about how journalists receive real-world training after college.

A young newspaper reporter is excited and ready to get going, and on his own goes after a story. It’s a good one, investigative, exposing some corruption, even naming names, local people with power. He works it up, working after hours and adding lots of sweat energy. He then submits it to his editor, who on reading it takes him aside and tells him that the story lacks objectivity, and that he is too personally involved, and so won’t be printed.

So, when he gets another idea for a story, rather than work it up, he approaches his editor in advance to discuss it. Again, he is told, he’s got to stand back, get a quote from both sides, and refrain from writing anything incriminatory of anyone – the job of a journalist is to objectively report both sides, and not to judge or get emotionally involved in a story.

His career was long and distinguished, as he took all advice to heart. He won awards. He wrote thousands of stories, always maintaining objectivity. And, oh yeah, before I forget, he never again had an original idea.

That is what editors are selected to do – dumb down journalists. (I once knew another Billings journalist, who in reporting on the death of a journalist friend, proudly said that he did not know over his newspaper career his political opinions. That, to them, is a compliment.)

The good ones leave. It’s been my experience that really good journalists often quit their jobs and do independent work, Gary Taubes, for instance. The ones that hang around, even the award winners, must have half-dulled faculties.

We’ve written plenty here about masks, which have no scientific merit. I would mention this Danish mask study, the largest and most rigorous done, as it showed that there is no difference in outcomes for those who mask and those who do not. However, I have a problem with it:  To judge outcomes, the people behind the Danish mask study, professional statisticians, used the results of PCR tests to decide who had the SARS-CoV-2 virus and who didn’t. The PCR test used in that manner is worthless, and so the Danish mask study is worthless too. Just let it be sufficient to understand that no virus has ever been proven to exist or to cause disease, and if such a thing existed and could cause disease, no mask would stop it. If I put burden of proof on Ehrlick to make his case for masking and vaxxing, he would come up empty-handed. But like everyone, he has been living in the infested swamp of agitprop, and has his own set of unchangeable facts.

I do not mask (stores mostly left me alone), never locked down, and I will not vaccinate. On the latter, I’ve not been convinced that any vaccine has ever been effective, and unlike Ehrlick, I’ve done independent study on this matter. I’ve traveled the depths of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, both professional frauds. I’ve read books and papers and listened to the people who promote vaccines, and without exception they speak generally and without citation, assuming that we should all know that it was a virus that caused polio (not so) and a vaccine that stopped it in its tracks (it was not). These are beliefs, not facts. Belief without evidence is also known as “religion”.

Journalists are bought in, I know, and cannot report anything contrary to the official narrative. As it works in humans, they fix their minds to align with power rather than seeking a new profession. The lie enforcement mechanism at work these days is stunning, the censorship pervasive, and fear omnipresent.

Yes, I am being hard on Darrell Ehrlick, never having met him. I am committing a logical fallacy in assuming that all journalists are fakes, Ehrlick is a journalist, ergo Ehrlick is a fake. Still, I ask that you read his piece about masks and vaccinating, and then form your own independent judgment. I think it safe to speculate if you do so you will come away with something akin to my point of view, that Darrell Ehrlick is a typical journalist, smug and short of any real insight.