Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Write about COVID, Get Harassed.



I must confess that I'm a little bit discombobulated these days.

It's no big deal, it's just that my bike is in the shop because I've once again worn the teeth down to the nub, on the cassette which is that little cluster of gears stuck right up against the back wheel.

My bike guy, S, says I've got to stop stomping down on the pedals in the higher gears, especially when I've got the chain on the big sprocket up front.

I told him I would try, but it was going to be difficult to stop myself from trying to keep up with the elderly hordes that go zooming past me on their eBikes every day.

Anyway, not having my bike means that I'm not getting the daily exercise that helps to tamp down my autonomic nervous system, especially on the sympathetic side of the ledger.

It also means that I've been taking the bus to and from the lab this week.

And, I've got to say, riding crowded buses always reminds me of how, in the great majority of instances, complete strangers manage to get along and are really very civil towards each other.

Of course, in the digital world, this isn't always the case, especially when it comes to all things COVID.

Take, for example, the case of local Lotuslandian broadcaster Jody Vance:

Vancouver broadcaster Jody Vance says she wants to see "something good" come from the years she spent fearing for her family's safety because of one man's relentless online harassment campaign.

Earlier this month, 53-year-old Richard Oliver pleaded guilty to criminal harassment for the violent and sexualized messages he sent to Vance, her colleagues and guests on her show...

{snip}

...The harassment charge concerned messages sent between March 2020 and September 2021, which were largely focused on Oliver's displeasure with Vance's reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The communications went beyond simply views and became aggressive and threatening in nature. They refer to things such as a 'day of reckoning,'" (Provincial Court Judge Peter) La Prairie wrote...


And then there is the case of Florence Debarre, the French evolutionary biologist who discovered that there were racoon dog sequences in the original Wuhan wet market DNA swabs, a finding which may turn out to support the zoonotic spillover hypothesis of how the SARS-CoV-2 originally infected people.

Now, to be very clear, Dr. Debarre was not offering the kind of opinions that a commercial broadcaster might that could upset some folks. In addition, Dr. Debarre was not out out there draping a zoonotic flag over a laboratory origin tombstone on social media. However, she was clear about the implication of her findings:

...Débarre stresses that other animal DNA was also found in the swabs, and that there is still no conclusive proof that raccoon dogs in the market were carrying the virus, or were the vehicle for its first spillover into humankind. “But now it cannot be denied that they were there,” she says...


And, for that she has been subject to a viscious onslaught online:

...Since the publication of her findings (on a pre-print server), Débarre has been set upon by online mobs and received threats to her safety. “Last night, I was crying over the horrible things I’m reading about myself on social media,” she says...

****

Now.

I obviously cannot possibly know how truly bad things got for Ms. Vance and Dr. Debarre.

And the examples you will see below are undoubtedly orders of magnitude milder than the the kind of crap Ms. Vance and Dr. Debarre had to deal with, if only because they are women.

However, I did have the temerity to write about the various COVID vaccines as they were being developed, starting back in the early 2021 when I wrote about that rare blood clotting disorder that was associated with the AZ virus-based vaccine. Not long after I started to write, carefully, about the risk/reward ratios of the RNA-based vaccines and soon thereafter the codswallop began to land on the doorstop of this blog in the form of nasty comments with some regularity.

At first I just deleted these missives from the comment threads and threw them in the trash. But it wasn't long before the volume was so overwhelming, and the narratives so unhinged, that I was forced to turn on the comment moderation feature for the first time since I started up this little F-troop listed blog way back in internet ancient times (i.e. 2004).

And with the moderation on, I also decided to archive things just in case something untoward happened down the road in the non-digital world. So far nothing like that has occurred, but now seems to be an opportune time to show you all some of this stuff so that you can see specific examples of what even a very small fish in a very, very small pond has to deal with:

____
I run a holistic medical private practice, and have a background in Molecular & Cell Biology, you NEVER EVER diagnose people of pathologies using a PCR test. EVER. It’s almost Biology 101, but science was thrown under the bus from the very beginning. I presume “it had to be this way” for us to see how corrupt the ENTIRE establishment really is. The swamp runs deep and wide indeed.
____ 
So-called authorities have disgraced themselves behind a new theology of degenerate “science” that veers back into superstition and necromancy. Proof that they don’t believe their own story shows in their desperate efforts to hide the data, confabulate numbers, ignore true facts, and lash out viciously at anyone who discloses their zealous deceits...

Be a real shame if something highly predictable were to happen to you because you are too compromised to do the right thing.
_____
Keep yourself firmly in the box, champ, or you might just suffer the loss of your cozy little sinecure doing nothing.
_______
Large numbers of injectees will see their health decline in coming weeks, and no amount of "variant" disinformation is going to change the obvious pattern.

Anybody hawking syringes under these circumstances should reasonably fear for their own safety.
____
A viral out-break with a minuscule death rate is not a pandemic, no matter how many times the w.h.o.Re$ change the definition.

Injuring and killing people who were at no risk is, however, a crime and justice will be meted out.
_____
Just keep boostin'...You'll eventually get what you deserve.


The above is just a small, but representative, sample of the more than 2,000 messages I archived through 2021 and 2022 (leaving aside some of the more personal stuff about my day job work and my cognitive abilities, not to mention the voluminous levels of lunatic fringe 'proof' demonstrating the existence of the 'plandemic').

The point is, do you see how unhinged and relentless these folks can be?

And do you see why, particularly because her harasser included a member of her family in his threat messages to her, Ms. Vance is, in my opinion at least, completely justified in initiating her civil suit now that that the criminal case is over?


.

3 comments:

e.a.f. said...

Ms. Vance did the right thing. It is unfortunate she had to take this course of action, but really what choice did she have.

You, the Dr, and Ms Vance were subjected to extreme bulling. It is not acceptable and threatening others is definetly off the table at all times. The three of you were expressing your thoughts on COVID and actually provided a public service.

Being a regular reader, I appreciated the information you provided.

It is one thing to disagree with others, but to threaten them or those they know is unacceptaable. People could just not read your blog or not listen to Ms. Vance. Why they chose to carry on as if you were all demons is beyond me.

Many people believe that is o.k. to bully women. Ms. Vance has sent a clear message and I congratulate her. You were wise to keep a record of the threats.

People need to get a grip and act like they're adults and not resort to school yard actions of wanting to harm others because they disagree. The world has enough of those people, Putin, Xi, etc.

Evil Eye said...

The "Eye" talks a lot about Transit and has done so fro over 40 years. The "Eye" subscribes to several "industry" news groups, some of which I was invited to join because I had valid points to offer.

The "Eye" writes letters to the Editor and politicians about Transit and has sent notes to news organizations and commentators only on official Emails.

During the past 40 years they "Eye" has been threatened by lawsuits from politicians (because I had proof of the same politicians telling porkies); the "Eye" has had threatening phone calls at all hours in the night; the "Eye" has been barred from so called public meetings because I asked hard questions, which do not make good photo-ops.

This is a News Release from Thales, who won a $1.47 billion contract to re-signal the Expo and Millennium Lines.

The last paragraph is very interesting.

"When the programme is fully implemented, the Expo Line will be able to accommodate 17,500 passengers per hour per direction, and the Millennium Line will be able to handle 7500 passengers per hour per direction, a 32% and 96% increase respectively."

If we read correctly, the present capacity of the Expo Line is 13,500 pphpd! This tells us that ridership on the Expo line is not as great as we have been told.

The present maximum capacity of the Millennium Line, is around 4,000 pphpd. 4,000 pphpd is the sort of bare minimum for a classic on-street European style tramway.

What is not mentioned is of great importance, such as operating 5 car trains of MALM stock (the correct name for the vehicles as SkyTrain is the name of the light metro network, which costs are not included) and the $1.5 billion to $2 billion much needed electrical rehab to operate the new trains.

We have been have been told porkies about the SkyTrain light metro system for decades.

Try telling that to the media, that they have been repeating TransLink's and the provincial government's "porkies" for decades and continue to do so.

The news Release -

TransLink awards Thales SkyTrain train control contracts

Contracts enable a 22km extension of the fully automated SkyTrain system.
TransLink awards Thales SkyTrain train control contracts - International Railway Journal (railjournal.com)

TransLink has awarded two contracts to Thales for upgrading the train control technology on the Expo and Millennium lines of Metro Vancouver.

TRANSLINK has awarded Thales two contracts to provide train control technology under the Expo and Millennium Line Upgrade Programme for the SkyTrain network in Vancouver.

The contracts include a new Operations Control Centre and a new fully automated depot, Operations Maintenance Centre 4. These two new facilities are key components of the upgrade programme.

The system will be expanded from 80km to 106km by 2028, with 41 new trains expected to be in service by the end of 2027.

TransLink says that in 2018 the Expo and Millennium lines saw on-time performance of 96.38% - the best punctuality on record for SkyTrain and higher than that achieved by most major metros in North America.

The government of Canada, the government of British Columbia, and the region have committed to investing $C 1.47bn ($US 1.1bn) in the Expo and Millennium Line Upgrade Programme until 2027.

When the programme is fully implemented, the Expo Line will be able to accommodate 17,500 passengers per hour per direction, and the Millennium Line will be able to handle 7500 passengers per hour per direction, a 32% and 96% increase respectively.



Anonymous said...

At least the sentence structures and spelling in the correspondence you cite lend coherence to the messages; very unlike the discombobulated writings in the comments section of the Epoch Times etc DJF