Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
On the issue of masks: – from Lifesite News.
June 1, 2021 (American Thinker) — The CDC finally said that vaccinated people can ditch the masks. Where I live (in a free red state), a lot of people promptly did. Now, at stores, nobody asks whether those without masks are vaccinated. We trust them to make their own decisions. However, a lot of people are still wearing those skimpy, often dirty rags on their faces. It turns out that they should ditch them, too, because a new, comprehensive study found that masks made no difference to the Wuhan virus’s spread.
Because I’d come from California, with its many wildfires, I had N95 masks on hand when the virus started. We wore them, and they may well have stopped a few virus particles from passing through. Of course, the fact that my limited supply meant that we also re-wore them and, about once a week, washed them with liquid detergent suggests that their protection was dubious at best.
Compared to our fellow Americans, we were well protected. Whenever we ventured out, we saw people wearing the equivalent of t-shirts or napkins on their faces. They had them under their noses, they touched them constantly, they shuffled them repeatedly in and out of pockets and bags, and they generally rendered them completely ineffective at stopping viruses. My feeling all year was that the masks were pure theater.
Since I first saw an early version of Phantom of the Opera, and the weekly Lone Ranger flick, I thought that masks were cool. I use to wear them all the time when I was pre-teen and the truth is that I never once caught any Covid stuff… so there is irrefutable proof they work.
I used to watch a lot of old western TV shows and the bad guys never got sick, it must have been due the masks they wore. I’m not saying they lived longer than the people who didn’t wear masks, especially on The Rifleman.
BTW, it’s been a long running joke in my house about wearing a Robin mask which is similar to one worn by the Lone Ranger, The Hornet, etc.
Masks aren’t just theater; they have become for many a sort of magical talisman against illness. As in ancient Rome you could buy protection scrolls or flying phallic charms at every corner vendor to ward off illness, so in modern Rome (and everywhere else) you can buy magic face charms from almost every store to prevent illness, and both have the exact same efficacy.
Our claim to fame as an age is that we have been able to foist a silly superstition onto an entire planet with greater evangelistic zeal and efficacy than any religion in the history of mankind, albeit without any of the at least interesting cultural heritage and artifacts to go with it (unless you count Tik Tok videos and the discarded masks on the sidewalks). And the worst part is that way too many people now love this superstition, believe it with all their hearts, and will never let it go.
As I’ve told before– my mom’s lungs are damaged enough that even in Washington State, she doesn’t have to mask.
Because back when they had all those nasty forest fires, she wore a mask– and it does work to stop a lot of the ashes and dust in the smoke, which protects your lungs…. unless you get pneumonia from wearing a mask for more than ~45 minutes, then switching to a new, clean one.
The rates of bacterial pneumonia are through the roof, especially with children. Of course, in states where they presume someone is infected if they die with respiratory issues, these are counted as COVID fatalities.
At Subic Bay in the PI, the grass cutters work masks made from white shirts. Also white coverings on their hair. At Halloween my then kindergarten son asked me to tie a mask on his face, which I did. I then asked if he were going to be a cowboy bandit for his costume. “No! I’m going as a grass cutter, Mom.”