Quarantine is a fairly simple and basic medical technique. When someone has an transmittable/infectious disease, you isolate them to prevent them from spreading that disease. It can be applied to someone suspected of having such a disease. It is a very old method, dating back to at least 1617. Pretty clear, eh?

At least until 2020, and now, this year. Now it is apparently a word of vastly-expanded definitions. Among those are confining someone who might have (or doesn’t have) an infectious disease, to prevent them from getting the disease. And shutting down “non-essential” locales, venues and activities in which some people MIGHT transmit or catch a disease from someone else.

With this expanded meaning, “quarantine” for the CCP virus (COVID-19) is an excuse for virtually anything that some one – especially a political or social media mob – things might prevent 99.8 percent of us from getting a respiratory disease. (Which may or may not be serious.) And killing 0.2 percent of the people who get that disease. (That is 1 person in 500 who die WITH or BECAUSE of the coronavirus disease.)

In 2020 and 2021, this twisted definition of quarantine, and a refusal to face and accept scientific facts has been coupled with sheer panic on the part of government and health officials – and the public. Why panic? Perhaps because they increasingly believe that life here on earth is all there is: that humans, like dogs, are dead all over (just like Rover, as the old rhyme goes). Because fear is contagious. (And there isn’t really a good way to quarantine against fear.)

And the result? Lockdowns. Social distancing (preventing ANY contact between anyone). And masks. Oh, yes, masks. In many places, they are mandated. Mostly “indoors” in public places. In some places, mandatory indoor anytime (except maybe private residences and apartments with immediate family members NOT at high risk of death from COVID). And in more and more places, outdoors and even in your own private automobile by yourself. (Queensland, for example.)

Never mind that masks have been scientifically proven over the past few months to have NO EFFICACY in preventing the spread of COVID. In keeping someone infected (symptoms or not) from infecting someone else. In preventing someone who does NOT have the disease from catching it. No, under the general umbrella of a strange definition of quarantine, wearing masks is mandatory. Failure to do so is punished.

The usual punishment is expulsion and exile: “No, you can’t shop here.” “No, you can’t go to this place or that place.” “No, you can’t leave where you are.” Demands usually condemned as violations of God-given liberty, human rights. Sometimes, the punishment is physical assault and punishment: a beating (or killing) by an aggressive, evil “do-gooder” nanny, or even a mob of panicked people. Sure that they are going to die if you aren’t wearing a mask. Sometimes just verbal assault: screaming obscenities, publicly humiliating the nonmasker. Threatening the anti-maskers.

In Germany, twisting the meaning has really exploded.

As Bloomberg reports, all of the German lander (states) have greatly increased requirements for masks and mask wearing. Fines of $5000 can be (and are) levied for failure to wear masks – and apparently the “proper” mask. But more: Germany is now converting refugee camps, juvenile detention centers, and other facilities to hold people who do not comply with COVID-19 dictats, including failing to “self-isolate” and apparently repeatedly failing to social distance, wear masks, and other mandatory actions, as reported by the Daily Mail. One Land, Saxony (in the former Ost Zone) is building the camp for this, as I write this.

Gee, didn’t we see this before? And don’t we know how it came out? Apparently, the people and leaders of the German lander have forgotten the lessons of less than a century ago (1933-1945).

I wonder what sign will hang over the gates of these new camps?

Germany is far from the only place in the world where the Pandemic Panic and Lockdown ™ has fried their brains. In Seattle, the Fire Department is going from door to door to inoculate their senior citizens (locked in their homes, apparently) using vaccines which have already killed a lot of people of that age, and at least one of which has been rejected by an entire State!

Other European governments are again fighting second and third waves of deaths with disproven, so-called “science” and some are caving into the panic and fear. (Norway, for example.) Despite cries of Cuomo (and others) about “needing to reopen,” American States are doing the same thing: doubling down on the Lockdown and Panic.

And people are trying to shame States which have not and do not comply with this new religious regime. An example: some people in Rapid City, South Dakota. An increase in crime (together with and blamed on an increase in homeless people) is blamed on Governor Noem and the State Government for encouraging people to move to a free State. And because “homeless people” are told they don’t have to wear masks and quarantine and social distance in South Dakota, supposedly they are flocking to Rapid City (where as I write this, the daytime temperature tomorrow is expected to get up to all of 25F). Fine weather to sleep under a bridge, in a tent, or a camper shell without heat or light.

It may not just be Grossdeutschland of 1933-1945 that is being imitated right now. Perhaps it is also the Germanies of the 1500s and 1600s. Where people were vilified, attacked, and often killed because their religious ideas and practices were different than what their human rulers wanted. Masks and social distancing are little more than religious rituals, new religious rituals of a bizarre, state civil religion, pushed by the medical-profession high priests and many so-called “men/women of God” (clergy, sky-pilots), as well as politicians and people with irrational fears of many things.

How much worse will this get? No way to know, but don’t expect it to get better soon.