What Radicalised Me re:Covid-19

A personal account/rant of int'l travel—with Children—in a time of Plague in summer 2021

In the wake of the past two postings, we’ll do two more trips down memory lane in this particular context (and for the time being): as regards the topic of yesterday’s posting—the utterly absurd, if not kafkaesque ruling™ on mandatory quarantine obligations in 2020/21, I’m offering you my personal experience (to be fair and honest, it’s more of a ‘here’s what I did in summer 2021’ account plus rant), which is today’s posting. This posting, in other words, is tied to the one linked below:

Court Punishes Covid Rule-Breaking Norwegians--After the Supreme Court OK'ed It

As regards the utterly corrupt public health™ establishment, let’s not forget that the shenanigans related to the 2020 WHO-declared, so-called Covid-19 pandemic™ are intimately tied to the 2009/10 swine flu pandemic™, in particular with respect to good manufacturing practices (sic), adverse event surveillance, and post-launch assessments. The Sunday posting, by contrast, is related to a lot of content in these pages talk about the roll-out, administration, and carnage of the C-19 poison/death juices in Norway:

The Full Account of C-19 Poison/Death Juice-Induced Carnage in Norway, 27 Dec. 2020-15 Jan. 2021

With that being said, here’s today’s rant, with all non-English content coming to you in my translation (and all emphases and [snark] being mine and mine alone).

One last thing to note: the below is for adult audiences only, it’s a lot of things but not family-friendly, and if you’re Australian, you probably won’t notice my French, so to speak.

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A Personal Account of Travelling to Norway in Aug. 2021

By epimetheus, 12 April 2025 [raises middle finger to public health officialdom]

All voyages start with the decision to go on a trip, and our travails in summer 2021 were no different. An elderly, close family member had been diagnosed with colon cancer in autumn 2020, and while he or she was both surprised, the emergency surgery had went quite well, that is, given the circumstances of Austria.

Morphing into what I have taken to call ‘Covidistan’, the gov’t had introduced very onerous mandates across the healthcare sector: apart from everything else (masking, contact tracing, etc.), each patient, whatever his or her condition, was permitted one visitor a day only, and that visitor must not be around for more than an hour.

Upon my relative’s initial emergency surgery (that successfully removed the tumour), hospital staff put him or her on broadband antibiotics—which he or she didn’t take well to. With his inflammation markers above 300 (normally, these are in the single digits) for a day or two, things looked bleak in that autumn. I recall asking my wife if she would like to travel to Covidistan and visit—she merely replied:

It wouldn’t matter as there’s but one visitor per day permitted, and that visitor cannot be one person on Monday and another person on Tuesday.

Long story short, that elderly family member eventually recovered as medical staff changed the antibiotics, inflammation markers came down, and he or she made a full recovery (as attested by the oncologist a few years later). For a while, he or she had to live with a stoma, though, which produced a different set of issues, but recovery went smooth enough for his or her surgeon to suggest a second round of surgery to remove the stoma and try to restore the GI tract.

This surgery was scheduled for late summer 2021, and it was the proximate reason for us—my wife, our two children, and me—to travel to Austria back then. That elderly relative was in his or her late 70s, and having overcome one (unplanned) surgery plus chemotherapy, the prospect of yet another round of surgery (it took some 12+ hours under full anaesthesia) was ‘good enough’ for us four to travel.

So, sometime in spring 2021, we booked the tickets and when the school year ended in late June of that year, we hopped into a taxi and went to the airport.

Act 1: Departing Norway in June 2021

The first thing to note was that the airport was comparatively empty. We had arrived in Norway in late July 2020, and while there were few mandates in place—mainly, airlines required face diapers while on board—there were no mandatory tests™ (still in short supply then) or other obligations. I recall getting to the hotel in late July 2020 and, after a day of travel (there were so few daily flights compared to BC™, or ‘before Covid’, it took comparatively longer to travel from Switzerland, via Amsterdam, to Norway), my wife and I went to a restaurant for a late meal (after 10 p.m.). The restaurant was pretty full, no-one gave a damn about Covid, and it all seemed, well, ‘normal’ (whatever TF that means today).

The situation had changed drastically by late spring 2021. Here follows a brief overview of the main mandates (skip if you’d like to follow my account):

• On 5 Nov. 2020, the Norwegian gov’t, upon expert™ advice, introduced mandatory quarantine regulations for all international travellers (ostensibly to prevent what was called importsmitte, or imported infections—hilariously stupid, if you think of it, as there’s been plenty of transmissions and infections in the country already)

• On 17 March 2021, the Norwegian gov’t tightened these rules and mandated that, while ‘strictly necessary travel’ was exempted, all otherwise ‘holiday’ or ‘leisure’ travellers were mandated to at least three days quarantine in a hotel until a ‘negative test result’ was provided; once a negative test™ was available, one was permitted to do the rest of the quarantine at home

• On 26 March 2021, this regulation was amended, and now the entire 10-day quarantine was mandated to be spent in a hotel (at your own expenses of about US$ 50 per day)

• On 28 April 2021, the gov’t introduced separate rules for ‘high-risk countries’ to ‘prevent the importation of new variants’; at first, this applied to Bangladesh, India, Iraq, Nepal, and Pakistan, with many more countries following suit

• On 9 May 2021, these separate rules were applied to all non-EU/Schengen countries, which meant that only strictly necessary travel within the EU/Schengen area was exempt from quarantine hotel obligations, which, from 13 May 2021, also applied to the UK

• In May 2021, these rules were further amended as they proved quite problematic to apply and enforce—there’s a large contingent of seasonal and other temporary workers arriving in Norway each year: Bergen and Stavanger are the main hubs for the offshore oil & gas industry (with its highly ‘flexible’ and ‘volatile’ workforce, and they are coming and going all the time), and then there’s the shipping industry (both commercial and recreational, which features a lot of these qualities, too). Hence, the gov’t permitted those permanent residents owning/renting property in Norway to spend the quarantine in their own home…
  While this sounds eminently ‘reasonable’, these amended rules literally required ‘documentation’ of ‘a suitable place to stay where it is possible to avoid close contact with others, with a single rooms, private bathrooms, and private kitchen or food service’ (of course there were separate rules for diplomats, military personnel, etc.)

• On 5 July 2021, Norway finally acceded to the EU’s health régime in all but name, implementing all crap coming out of Brussels, Amsterdam (the European Medicines Agency’s seat), and Stockholm (seat of the ECDC)

These were the rules™ governing travel to Norway; the Austro-Covidian régime had their own set of stupid considerations, incl. armed military patrolling (harassing) passengers at Vienna Int’l Airport, not-yet mandatory Covid Vaccine Passports, and the like.

Travel in late June 2021 was an extreme hassle: upon advice by the airline (we flew KLM back then), we got to the airport 3-4 hours before boarding. The departure area was virtually empty (spooky), these damn automated ticketing machines wouldn’t print the boarding passes, which we learned later was due to ours being a connecting flight—if we flew only to one country (layover in Amsterdam), we’d be getting the boarding passes and baggage tags there. Since we went to Austria, however, we spent two hours waiting before one lazy ground crew member showed up and opened a counter.

We then spent the next 1+ hour queuing with the rest of our flight who all were both highly anxious, our kids (born in 2014 and 2017, respectively: do the math in terms of their age in summer 2021) were getting increasingly queasy, and what seemed the combo of little experience and extra demands imposed on the lone ground crew staffer. Needless to say, it was all highly absurd as most passengers were middle-aged and elderly people, with indoor masking requirements in place—although not for minors.

Imagine the ‘fun’ of children running around the departure hall, yelling ‘coming through’ as they swirled around the other queuing passengers—I suppose their anxiety shot up as these ‘disease vectors’ ran around w/o face diapers. I was, of course, fully prepared to call anyone a wide variety of names if they so much as looked at my children the wrong way (none of this was required). The main difference to BC™ being that passengers with little kids used to be prioritised; in summer 2021, this wasn’t the case.

When we finally got to the counter, we checked in and moved through security checkpoints. If you’ve been keeping count of the time spent at the airport, there wasn’t much time left before departure.

As far as I recall, the layover and the connecting flight to Vienna went well enough. After some 20 or so hours of ‘travel’, we arrived in Austria.

Act 2: Summer Madness, Austria/Covidistan Style

Arrival in Austria was surreal enough: armed military was patrolling on the airport, everybody look waaaaay more anxious than in Norway, and there was a military checkpoint between leaving the arrival area and the baggage reclaim area.

There, one had to endure stupid, bellowed questions by young conscripts, such as ‘why do you travel to Austria’, to which I replied, in my broadest possible Viennese, ‘why [expletives omitted upon my wife elbowing me, parental style] do you think?’

Once we made it out of the airport, it was face diapers off, never to be put on while in Austria, and hugs and kisses to our (in)laws and grandparents who picked us up from the airport.

We spent the next five weeks with them; they have a pool on their property, hence our kids were spending most of their free summer time in the water, interspersed with trips meeting other relatives and friends (whom we hadn’t seen in a year) and BBQ.

Yes, our cancer survivor was in an ambivalent mood: chemotherapy was done, but he or she had to undergo regular blood-testing and surgery preparations, which meant regular trips to the GP, which is how I learned about that GP ‘treating’ his ‘unvaccinated’ patients in the parking lot:

Footnote 13: a family doctor in Covidistan wishes to treat only 'jabbed or recovered' in-house, all [unclean] people may only be treated in the parking lot

In case you’re wondering: my cancer-stricken, elderly relative had remained unvaccinated™ upon the express recommendation of his oncologist. He or she also became ever more ‘conspiracy theory’-minded during the Covid Mania in Austria.

There are bits and pieces of occurrences that betrayed the relative calm before the proverbial storm (vaccine mandates) in Austria-Covidistan in summer 2021: Vienna’s insane state gov’t had imposed way more stringent mandates than neighbouring Lower Austria (where we were staying), which meant, in practice, that stepping into an ice cream parlour on one side of the state line required masking (or, as we did, not going there) while the same outfit on the other side of the state line didn’t (where we went).

While absurd, it was but a far cry from what would eventually transpire as my home country went full bonkers from autumn 2021 onwards:

The Covid Coup

But I digress.

Here, it suffices to mention that my elderly relative’s second surgery went well, and in mid-to-late July 2021, the four of us packed our bags and travelled back to Norway—and this is where the insanity documented below quadrupled.

Act 3: Travelling to Norway in July 2021

Due to drastically reduced flight schedules, there were very few connections available, and the one we eventually booked returned us to Norway around 11:30 p.m.

This was the view Norwegian travellers encountered when they returned home to Flesland and other Norwegian airports. [source]

This is a big, fat, and stinkin’ LIE.

When we returned to Norway in summer 2021, there were private security firm personnel (Group4Security) contracted by police and/or the gov’t and/or the airport (probably by all three) who—before passport control and thus technically outside Norway—blocked arriving passengers and sorted them according to their ‘vaccination status’.

At that point in time, one was discriminated against by official gov’t policy based on a decision involving the sovereignty over one’s body. Imagine the irate yapping by all the feminists over ‘my body, my choice’, that is, unless the gov’t permitted you the possibility to go to a bar—all that you’d have to do is taking these poison/death juices. What a f***** shitshow.

Yet, since Norway only considered the modRNA poison/death juices ‘appropriate’ (the Astra/Zeneca and J&J poison/death juices were discontinued in March 2021 due to several—six, if memory serves—first responders fainted and ‘died suddenly’), we found ourselves in the company of mainly Russian-speaking travellers who, apparently, took the ‘wrong’ (Sputnik or whatever) poison/death juices.

The next absurdity occurred at passport control, with a clearly sleepy—it was almost midnight then—police officer asking ‘why are [we] travelling to Norway’—‘we live here’, we answered, but you could feel the tension as we stood in the ‘unclean’ queue.

Once through passport control, we ‘unclean’ were taken to a bus and chauffeured a few minutes around and brought to the old terminal building of Bergen airport. In the windowless bowels of that godawful building, a pop-up clinic for testing™ was installed.

There, people wearing neither name tags nor ID would be sitting, masked, behind plexiglass fronts demanding you to identify yourself by holding the passport against the plexiglass front. As it was around midnight then, and this dude was certainly ‘working’ long hours, I had to hand my passport to him (the horror) so he could read my details. The data went into their computer/database—imagine, they didn’t use passport reading devices like banks and customs officials—and I never found out where my personal data went.

We then received a paper slip number and were told to wait for our turn. At that point in time, my then-4yo had fallen asleep on my shoulders, and that, of course, complicated matters as I was repeatedly told to stop carrying that dreaded disease vector (which, at that point in time, elicited some stern replies, as in, ‘fuck off, moron’). Our then-7yo fought bravely against exhaustion. To her, everything was utterly incomprehensible and, I surmise, insane.

When it was my turn to get ‘tested’ (with a lateral flow, so-called rapid antigen ‘test’), I carried my sleeping child and ventured over to the booth. There, I struck up a conversation with the gut administering the ‘test’—turns out he was a young medical student who was doing 12+ hours shifts ‘for the money’. He struck me as nice enough, didn’t harbour any prejudices, and was nice enough to express his concerns about my tired children.

Once done with the ‘testing’, it was yet another round of waiting for the results, to which another 15-20 minutes were added because we were not permitted to leave the area individually but had to wait for the group to re-assemble (talk about the insanity of ‘infection control measures’ for a moment…), led—still by private security contractors—back to bus. From thence, it was some more 10 minutes driving time (all airport terminal buildings are connected, in case you’re asking yourself if this was all necessary), and then finally permitted to reclaim our bags.

Turns out, for one or the other reason, our baggage was not on the same flight (it was around 1:15 a.m. then), and, of course, no-one was there to talk to.

We eventually made it out of the airport, got into a taxi, and went home.

That taxi ride was fine: the driver was a foreigner who didn’t wear a mask, and when we asked if it was o.k. to take off our masks, too, he gave us an earful of opinions about Covid, the Norwegian gov’t measures, and the like.

Bottom Lines

Of course the quarantine™ was a farce. The régime has far too few enforcers (plenty of spare-time snitches, though), let alone the capabilities to do much, if anything, when faced with even a small crowd of dissenters.

So, here’s my admission: I didn’t give a flying f*** about any of it.

None, zilch, zero.

I didn’t wear a face diaper, nor did I care about any of the other things.

I did leave my phone at home, though, when I went to the grocery store.

Also, I learned from fellow parents with small children—they went to Australia—who had to stay at a quarantine hotel upon their return to Norway. They basically stayed outside with their children all day, running around the woods, playing catch on the seaside, and keeping to themselves. It was, basically, ‘like a vacation’, I was told afterwards. Interestingly they, too, remained ‘unvaccinated’, yet they complied with these mandates far longer/more than I ever did.

Two more things to note here:

First, what gave away the game to me?

Well, imagine me standing in the driveway of the place we rented in the suburbs. It’s September 2020, it’s relatively warm, and my wife and I were cleaning up the driveway.

You need to know that Norwegian suburbs are quite some the ones found in North America: cul-de-sacs abound, and our house was located some 70-80m inside some private property, and whoever came for a visit, had to walk a rather steep hill for a few minutes, and we couldn’t be seen as being outside from the road.

In early September 2020, two young people—possibly students working for a temp work agency—walked up the hilly driveway. Wearing yellow vests and carrying tablets, they said something in Norwegian.

‘Sorry, I don’t speak Norwegian’, I replied.

So they explained themselves in English:

We are doing a survey for the United Nations about opinions on vaccination.

Needless to say, I sent them packing, muttering something like, ‘I’m not answering any questions’, or the like.

Remember, this was September 2020, and while the poison/death juices were already discussed, legacy media was still somewhat ambivalent about their use.

And then there were the ‘issues’ with message control upon the roll-out of these poison/death juices. By February 2021, AstraZeneca’s poison/death juices were stopped in Norway, citing ‘sudden and unexpected’ deaths of nursing staff in Austria, among other places—and we knew about them from our family in Austria.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. And this brings me to the second aspect:

How does one stay sane?

Well, the first thing I’d freely admit is—that due to lack of Norwegian skills, we literally had no idea what legacy media and everybody else was talking about from summer 2020 through spring 2021. Not that I missed out on much, if anything, but it certainly made sure we were shielded form the worst kind of abuse and scorn heaped on ‘the unvaccinated’ (I got plenty of news™ from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, which wasn’t that different…).

I do think the first aspect I’d note is that my wife and I were on the same page—including, in particular, protecting our children.

Norwegian primary schools were virtually unaffected by any gov’t mandates, and I’m very grateful that my elder daughter could start school in a relatively ‘normal’ environment (the level of instruction was piss-poor, hence she didn’t learn a lot, although I’m allowing for a few months—three or so—until she had mastered Norwegian). Still, no mask mandates, tests™, or quarantine rules (the only mandatory test she took was in January 2022 before returning to school after the Christmas break).

The same virtually applied to kindergartens (i.e., my younger daughter), although we noted a huge turnover of the all-vaxxed staff members who were on sick leave very often. In fact, my kid’s kindergarten at times—in spring 2022—was forced to reduce opening hours due to excessive levels of sick leave of staff.

As an aside, I’ve posted about that kindergarten before, and you’re very welcome to check out these postings:

Footnote 10

Footnote 12

Putting these notions behind me, what else did we do?

I grew up in the city centre of Vienna, and as an academic, I’d spent most of my life living in cities. By late 2021, we had determined that we’d like to move to the countryside. So, we started looking into small farmsteads, and upon buying one well outside the city limits, we moved there in summer 2022.

Best decision ever.

The next neighbours are some 500m away, there are no street lamps, and if a car passes by, I can smell it. (As to the smell test, if you live in cities, you can’t smell the ubiquitous dog poop due to shitty [pun intended] air quality. I’m unsure if I like the smell of my dog’s poop, but I can smell it.)

So, I’m spending a lot of time outdoors, together with my family—we’re still renovating, but that’s o.k. We have a bunch of sheep, a cat (we live in a wooden house), a sheepdog, several chicken, and 2.5 horses (technically, two horses plus a pony). If you like to check out what life’s like here, you’re herewith invited to follow our ram, aptly named Ramses, over at BlueSky:

https://bsky.app/profile/ramsesandhisgang.bsky.social

(As an aside, this is another pet project of mine: since so many legacy journos™ left X/Twitter in a fit last autumn, my aspiration is for my sheep to at one day have more followers than those moronic Branch Covidians. It’s a long-term project, but if you’d like to help out by following Ramses & his Gang, I’d much appreciate it.)

So, to tie together these aspects—I don’t want to begin to imagine how hell-ish my life would have become if my wife and I weren’t on the same page.

Virtually all of my relatives are jabbed multiple times, including my nephews who are about the same age as my kids.

As the above-reproduced personal account (rant) shows, once you’re subject to arbitrary tyranny, however nonsensical, matters don’t ‘improve’, but they fortify the already existing convictions.

That episode in summer 2021 was one of the key moments for me in determining to start this little webzine here.

That—and remembering the pre-Covid world that is no longer:

The World We Left Behind

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this overly long rant, thank you for reading. Regular content continues tomorrow.