The Safety Scourge

A postponed playoff game is a sign of the times.

There are few things more dangerous than excessive “safety.” Especially when our protection is compulsory.

Since the turn of the century, our zealous guardians have been stirring the pot. With an onslaught of military misadventures, financial repression, relentless debt, biomedical malfeasance, cultural perversion, and weather-related rip-offs, they turn up the heat and bring anxiety to a boil.

For decades, we’ve endured endless “emergencies” from which we need to be “saved”. And a squad of prohibitions and compulsions are ever ready at the rescue. We’re told personal liberty places society at risk, and that no one can be free until everyone is “safe”.

But like an invading army that’s crossed the frontier, the “crises” have started coming closer to home. And often within it.

We’re told what stoves we can’t have, which cars we must drive, the rate our water should flow, and what food we should eat. Arbitrary prescriptions and proscriptions come from owners of private jets and exclusive yachts, who tell us meat is deadly and eggs are dangerous.

Now, even bad weather is a plight from which governments must save us. When we were kids, it took the threat of nuclear war for us duck under our desks. Now, schools close if winds are too high or temperatures too low.

Every summer, governments lecture grown adults about what to do when it gets hot: drink water, stay in the shade, take it easy, keep cool. Only someone dumb enough to inject a drug for a donut wouldn’t already know this. 

This is part of a process to cultivate dependency by instilling fear of everyday events. After the last few years, they’ve become emboldened. In the name of “protecting the public”, every inconvenience or nuisance becomes a major “emergency” that can only be resolved by the entity declaring it.

As it often does, the latest example comes from the state of New York. 

During the “global cooling” panic of the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy narrated a propaganda piece describing how cold weather was making Buffalo unlivable. It included such irrefutable assurances as “experts believe”, “according to recent evidence”, and that “the brutal Buffalo winter might become common across the United States.”

Sounds scary. It makes us want to drive a jeep while burning coal and eating a steak.

But I’m not the only one who’s taken note. This weekend the governor of New York, who can’t resist meddling in anything, postponed a football game because of too much snow. 

In Buffalo!

Outside of California, no American city is more familiar with flakes. My uncle was born, raised, educated, employed, married, and buried on the eastern edge of Lake Erie. After 94 birthdays, he died there a couple years ago. For almost six decades, from the day the team was founded, he’d attended every Buffalo Bills game in western New York.

None were ever postponed or cancelled because of bad weather. This was Buffalo. In football season, conditions were often terrible. Which was advantageous to the home team.

And the locals loved it. They got to games if they could. Those who couldn’t, didn’t. But most did. They assessed their own risk, and figured it out. They didn’t need some top-down authoritarian to make decisions for their own good.

The ball was always kicked at the scheduled time. And if it weren’t, the government wouldn’t have been the entity to pull it away. That would’ve been up to the league, and the respective owners of each team. Buffalonians didn’t need incompetent nannies to push them around.

Speaking of whom…

Perhaps unwittingly acknowledging Nimoy was right, John Kerry resigned as “Climate Envoy” the same day the governor put the Bills’ game on ice.

(Incidentally, leaving aside that this silly position exists to perpetuate a racket, what kind of weird title is “climate envoy”? Is it the U.S. government’s ambassador to the atmosphere? If so, maybe the weather was wise enough to sever diplomatic relations.)

If snow is becoming too severe for Buffalo, then maybe Kerry realized a warmer planet is the least of our problems. Even so, the state’s intrusive governor doesn’t need to get involved.

The local tyrants are more than willing to intervene.

Last month, Jordan Schachtel reported that Erie County, of which Buffalo is the seat, created an online “portal”, where residents could request permission to commute to work. 

According to the county news release, from Schachtel’s article:

“The travel exemption portal will define specific categories of workers using a tiered concept to identify who would be exempt from a travel ban in order to commute to and from their place of employment. The list of essential employees will be reviewed annually and employers will be asked to provide updates when an essential employee’s work status changes for any reason that warrants removal from the exemption list.”

They’re even shameless enough to retain the condescending “essential” designation that was so disastrously deployed during the covid fiasco. 

And, as in that unconscionable calamity, travel restrictions would apply only during “emergencies”, which would (naturally) be declared by the agency that accrues power from the decree. 

Those violating our rights to keep us “safe” are the same sort of (and in some cases the exact same) people who assured us we’d need to “shelter in place” for only fifteen days.

They retained “mitigation measures” long after it was obvious they were far more damaging than the virus they were meant to mitigate. Society was deliberately debilitated so no one would get sick. 

The US government’s “state of emergency” wasn’t lifted till last May! For three years, millions of lives were ruined to keep any individual from catching a cold. Cancer screenings, heart scans, and other evaluations were all delayed or denied. The extent of the damage won’t be known for decades. 

And those inflicting it still aren’t done. Nor do they ever plan to be. After the crimes of covid, no consequences were suffered. No one responsible has even issued an apology. 

Because they aren’t sorry. They don’t think they did anything wrong. Their only regret is things didn’t go as far as they’d planned. But they’ll keep trying, and they’re not going away.

In the usual dens of derangement…after all this time and everything we know…mask mandates have reappeared. These tend to be places like medical facilities, “elite” colleges, government agencies, or urban sanctums of incurable insanity. 

Yesterday a member of the Doug Casey’s Phyle posted a disturbing reminder that while covid restrictions may occasionally be relaxed, they’re not intended to go away. Before a flight to the U.S., he received this note:

This anti-scientific absurdity obviously has nothing to do with “health.” It’s a useless precaution rational people would’ve assumed had elapsed.

But no.

Under the misbegotten guise of “safety”, these capricious rules are a deliberate infusion of “regime uncertainty”…a Sword of Damocles reminding us that at a given moment, whatever we value can be taken away.

They intend to keep people guessing, to become accustomed to being told what to do…but to be unsure when. And to meekly acquiesce when prior plans are wiped away.

This isn’t about protecting us. It’s about conditioning us to be controlled. Like a football game being repeatedly postponed, it’s designed to keep us perpetually uncertain, and constantly on edge.

Because when you don’t know what’s coming, you can’t prepare. And it’s almost impossible to resist.