Clever marketing or coercion as companies peddle vaccine discounts [Video]

In my own e-mail inbox I spotted this interesting advertisement.

Yes, you even get a code “VAXNRELAX”. Apply this to your travel plans made through Hotwire and you get a $20 discount.

There are certainly two ways of looking at this. One is the more benign way. The travel industry was decimated over this last year by the lockdowns all over the world. Planes were literally almost absent from the skies in some places for some period of time. Automobile travel was affected as people were told to stay in their homes. Rail travel, bus travel – you name it – anything involving getting from here to there was hit, and hit really hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant precautions that in many places morphed into revolution-inducing hysteria. People stayed in their houses except for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, because, after all, burning buildings and cars is a great prevention means against COVID… right?

Well, it certainly seemed that way for all the demonstrations we had while told to “socially distance”, avoid “dangerous” places like houses of worship and other members of our own families.

But now, the US and other nations are getting back online, virus be damned. The COVID-19 vaccines are in full deployment worldwide and with varying degrees of penetration in populations around the world. Israel leads presently with over 60% of their population inoculated, but the US is coming along rather well at roughly 30-33% from reports I read.

It would certainly be a positive incentive to get things going to offer some discounts for getting vaccinated, so we can “get on with things.” Without any further context, this is definitely a positive effort.

However, there is a further context: the large majorities of people in many nations who view the vaccines with anything from doubt and fear of side effects, to doubt and fear of going against one’s religious ethics and beliefs, to those (like me) who simply do not appreciate the government trying to make me take any sort of medication for any reason.

The more hostile way is being played out by the advertising shown above and other such campaigns, and it is encouraged by the Great Resetters who are now in control of the American government.

Joe Biden, the Hologram (and Chief Imposter) actually tried to shame those of us who are rather determined NOT to get the vaccine. Here you can see what he had to say.

So, those of us who refuse the vaccine are “lazy” and we are also murderers and killers.

Kind of like what he said about Russian President Putin.

This guy is not making friends with a great many citizens of the United States as well as abroad. The “doubters” (heretics to the regime’s new religion) will eventually have to reckon with this.

Well, to be fair, maybe he is right. Maybe the vaccines are totally safe and maybe this is an ethical move. After all, everyone in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that was there to receive the Holy Fire did indeed receive it (though I caught a glimpse of one scene that seemed unusually frantic or energetic and it made me wonder), but the Holy Fire descended. Maybe God does not really mind the vaccine. Or, maybe he is just tolerating our foolishness and helping us not have a further paroxysm of hysteria. (If the Fire had not come, it might have touched off a wave of suicides, for example, among many struggling Christian believers who would be convinced that the world’s time is up.)

There seem to be other signs that things are not going bad for folks who receive the vaccine. Many of my friends have done so and every single one has been almost carbon copies of each other, saying how happy they are that they got it.

Sorry folks, but that does not help me relax or quiet the nagging inner doubt I feel, and I am nowhere near as adamant about all of this “do not get the vaccine!” stuff as some of my other friends, who are passing reports (and getting summarily blocked on social media for doing so) about the incidence of something called “spike protein shedding” that has reportedly led to women bleeding as though they are having their menstrual cycle but it isn’t so, and I have seen some horrific photos of skin damage attributed to this characteristic of the vaccine making a genetic change to our bodies. Added to this is the continuing fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is hardly a civilization-threatening pandemic, with only a very small percentage of people actually dying directly from it.

I will include some links here for further reading on that, but I hope to get more in depth about this issue in the coming days. Unlike many people in journalism, I prefer to sit on ongoing stories for a while to consider them carefully and report on that effort of analysis rather than to hurriedly try to be “hot and current” with whatever the popular disaster du jour is.

Right now, the main factor appears to be an effort to silence doubt and dissent, whether through Deep State and woke thuggery, as demonstrated by Biden’s veiled threats and CNN’s obvious ones, or this way, through cheap financial temptations. The actual vaccine is offered at no charge, so why not get a little incentive for receiving it?

All of this, thankfully, is not a mandate from the Almighty Government. But it is damned close, and the notion that this could be mandated, not only by the American government but by states all over the world has a lot of us very nervous. However, conservatives being what they are psychologically, it is difficult to rouse them to defiance or protest unless they have already been pushed very far over the edge. Contrasted with “everything triggers me” woke liberals, this is certainly more sane, but it also runs the risk of great loss of personal liberty, and this is the same no matter where anyone lives. Even people living in “Free States” like Texas, Florida and Mississippi, have to contend with policies that come from state and national government living in obeisance to the COVID-19 “saints” and “clergy.”

In other words, this is basically a policy set being established along a pseudo-religious framework. We all can hear it in the arguments from both sides, too. “Trust the Science” is the new “Trust in the Lord.” So is “We follow the science”, though this one is frustratingly entertaining because there are more than one “science” to follow. This sort of five-second-soundbite rhetoric is catchy, but truly empty of helpful information. We might be able to put both sides of the vaccine debate against each other and just conclude that it is the usual patter of two opposing philosophies diverging as they fight one another with polemic. This has happened throughout history and especially in Christian history as heresies and schisms rose and went through their life cycles. One side “causes” the other to exist by virtue of argument.

However, with COVID-19, I suggest that the rhetoric is largely false, or at least untrustworthy on both sides, yet, it exists because of the religious fervor of the COVID-fearing people. The counter arguments by people who wish to not be dominated by this are sophisticated, scientific, and they may even be correct, but they are useless, because the core issue is never brought up:

That issue is simply the right to say “I do not want to participate in this, and I will not change my life because of this.” And, to follow through with that decision. This is the issue of personal sovereignty in the most intimate way possible – what I do with / to one’s own body. Do I have the right to leave it alone, or must the government of my country seize control of my life and destiny because I do not give it authority over me?

This looks remarkably like the trope used by pro-abortionists, doesn’t it? Only for them, they pit their bodies over the lives of unborn children, which is an entirely different argument: my wants versus the needs of truly innocent beings.

This argument is different. It is my needs / wants versus the desires of Government.

I think that, here, “Biden, Dr Fauci, keep your hands off my body” is resoundingly appropriate. After all, a great many of us do not desire homosexual relationships nor do we wish to have affairs against our spouses in marriage. This is about as personal as it gets, and so the vaccine propaganda is exceedingly intrusive.