I'm in my second week of the Stations of the COVID.
Week one was pretty miserable until the Paxlovid kicked in, and tolerable - more or less just a bad flu - through the weekend. Yesterday - about four or five days after the last Paxlovid dose - the head congestion got worse. This suggests I'm moving into the "Paxlovid rebound" I've read about.
Frankly, if the symptoms get no worse? I'm fine. It's irritating (for some reason decongestants seem to have no effect on this damn bug) but no more than that.
Other than that I've been faintly...amused is too gentle a word for it; I think "scornful" is closer...at the ridiculous antics of my supposed "fellow Americans" who've been sucking on the FAUX News crack pipe.
First, what the actual fuck is this:
Is this some sort of fucked-up Narnia cosplay? Tubby as Emperor complete with lion wingman and some sort of UH-60 pimp-my-ride? Who could actually think of this tangerine-colored crook like this?
Whatever.
Beyond the usual idiocy, though, it's telling that all the news out of MAGAtLand is about various culture war stuff, but what the hell else do these gomers have to sell their C.H.U.D.s?
"Tax Cuts for Rich Fucks - Now In Your Face!" "Our Insurance Company Bureaucrat Will Totally Fuck Your Medical Care For Good Profit Reasons, Not Woke Shit Like A Government Bureaucrat Would!" "We Promise - Your Grandpa CAN Eat Nutritious Cat Food...and Like It!"
Take away the grade-school-homo-bullying and Bible-banging and what else do the sonsofbitches have, anyway..? I just wish they'd fuck off and do it somewhere that nice people don't have to see it. Like writing and masturbation.
Speaking of lions, though...here's our own domestic predator:
See the bald spot?
That's where the little goof got his flea treatment. It's NOT supposed to do that. Why he got a bald spot there I have no idea, but it might be stress, because he's on a diet and he haaaates it. He woke me as usual the other day:
Cat: Food!
Me: Keep yer fur on. I’m coming.
C:Food!!!
M: Jesus wept. Okay. Here.
C: Nomnomnom
M: (making coffee)
C: Outside!
M: Ooookay, chief. But be advised - it’s fecking cold out there.
C:Outside!!!
M: (opens door)
C:
M: Gah! Hurry up! It’s freezing-ass cold!
C:
M: Well? Don’t just stand there!
C: Feh. It’s freezing-ass cold. Not going.
M: No, duh? Okay, Imma get coffee.
C: Umm…there wouldn’t happen to be a smackerel more cat food just lying about, would there..?
M: Not for your chonky ass, no.
C:
M:
C: What a hellhole this place has become. Okay. Fine. If anyone calls I’m doing some important butt-licking and can’t be disturbed. Just take a message.
Well, that's about all I got for now. Time to go lie down and blow my nose for the gajillionth time. Ugh.
And I'm fully vaxxed and triple-boosted AND I got on Paxlovid within a day of the symptoms showing up.
Which they did as we were cleaning up the living room walls last Sunday night.
We painted these walls, oh, maybe ten years ago. The paint was a specialty brand called "Devine" that we found at the local Miller Paint store. We loved the smooth shades and cool textures; pretty much the whole Little House is done in this Devine paint of one shade or another.
And we've been very happy with it, by and large. Except the brown color we painted the front room and the hallway.
Not that we don't like the color - we do! - but over the years the walls slowly developed this odd white discoloration. My guess, from the home improvement literature, is that this was "chalking", apparently something that happens the paint deteriorates and the pigment and binder separate.
It wasn't harmful to the paint, just ugly.
I found out purely by accident - cleaning up an area where the Little Cat had shaken her bloody ear (we still miss you, sweetie!) - that windex-type cleaner removed the white discoloration for some time - at least a year. It seemed worth a try to avoid repainting the entire room.
So we moved everything away from the walls and went to work.
It pretty much sucked as much as you'd imagine, and so I wasn't surprised that I was sore and tired when we finished. What was odd was that I was also stuffy and was developing a nasty cough from the drip in my throat.
And that was late evening.
By midnight I was perfectly miserable. Think "the worst flu I've ever had" miserable; congestion like stone in my forehead, body aches like I'd been pounded with a hammer, sneezing, coughing...ugh. Like I said; miserable.
One of the few good things about getting old is that your immune system has pretty much seen it all. You tend to miss the colds and flus that the younger people around you contract simply because you've had it, or something enough like it, to keep you immune.
So I'd forgotten how utterly shitty it is.
So, yeah. Sunday night (and Monday morning) was a total shitshow. By the time I got out of bed (I won't say "got up" because I didn't get more than an hour or so of badly broken sleep) I was convinced that I had the Plague and, sure enough, the faint line faded in below the "T" that confirmed that, yes, finally, more than three years after it had exploded out of southeastern China the fucking coronavirus had nailed me.
Monday was a misery punctuated by trying to figure out how to avoid dosing three other people in a tiny, 1,100-square-foot house. I did a video call with my GP, who got me a course of Paxlovid that, as sucky as the drive was, I ran up to Janzen Beach to pick up.
Lemme tellya. Paxlovid? That stuff is just better than sliced white bread.
I took the first dose Monday night and had another shitty night, but by Tuesday morning I was feeling more human. By the time I' writing this - Tuesday night- I have a "head cold", no worse.
Mind you...had I not been vaccinated, not been boosted, not had the Paxlovid?
You might well not be reading this.
I've got another four days of Pax before I'm out of the woods, and apparently there's a "rebound" that this fucking Plague slaps you with once you've finished the meds. The damn thing is a genuine threat, and a wag of the middle finger towards the idiot antivaxxers and Republicans who try and pretend otherwise.
K. Well, I gotta go put some pictures back up. Catch ya later.
Update 1/25: So this Paxlovid stuff is the bomb.
Seriously. It's kicking the 'rona's ass (along with the vaccines, I'm guessing). By this morning I was up and running around - mostly getting meds for pets (the cat's flea treatment) and people (more Paxlovid for my Bride, who probably has this damn Plague, too). Still achy down my back and still with headcold gunk in my skull. But otherwise? Good to go.
I'll be around here in a bit, I've got some thought but need to get them organized.
So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.
Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).
Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.
In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely.
The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.
And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.
Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?
And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?
I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.
And speaking of people doing fucked up things...
I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason
Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.
The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason.
The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)
While in Brazil...
...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.
It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.
This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags.
We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.
But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.
Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:
"If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."
I come to you this morning with a tale of the deepest and weightiest eschatology, a parable of the righteous and the unrighteous, and, also, of Private Black, who stands amongst you like the sheep amongst the goats.
Brother Black...may I call you brother, Private Black? Thenk-yew. Brother Black came to me, when I was indwelling in my studies which is to say I was reviewing the S-4 requests your various platoon sergeants have provided to me and, no, AT Platoon, you are not getting a fucking Reaper drone, not just no but fuck no, so don't even try that shit again.
And thereupon rousing me from my orisons Brother Black informed me that he had received "direct divine instruction" that he need not perform the extra duty imposed upon him by the Company Commander the previous Wednesday due to a certain incident at the Flaming Mug involving a bottle of Wesson Oil and three Cambodian sisters.
Now my brothers...my heart was troubled by this.
I was cast into the keelson-deep despair by the thought of my brother Black finding that his Lord and Savior found fault with his buffing the dayroom floor to a sort of crystalline perfection that I, too, suddenly found myself in the presence of the Almighty.
"I am but a sinner, oh Lord," I said, "but if Thou shalt enlighten me then I shall be exalted by your wisdom."
"A sinner thou art" The Creator replied, "But not as big a fucking liar as young Mister Black here, who just wants to ditch his extra duty so he and his yobo can go to the pushbutton and get drunk and screw."
"Then what shall I do, oh Lord?" I asked, and the Lord replied; "Fucking smite his young ass as hard as it will bear, and spare not the rod or spoil the private."
So, my brothers, you will see young Private Black communing with the spirits of Johnson Paste Wax and the dayroom floor all the rest of this week, and it is with a full and contrite heart I come to you saying; try.
Just fucking try.
That shit on me.
And thou shalt find thyselves face-down on my desk and I will apply the rod of the UCMJ to your young asses, and in full measure shall you learn wisdom from the smiting. For sayeth the FM: the ears of a private are in his ass, and hearing cometh from a good solid kicking.
I have BEEN to the mountaintop, oh my brothers, and you do NOT want to fuck with me and find out what I found there.
Cruz, along with 99.9% of his Republican pals, have been effectively spewing anti-vaxx and anti-epidemologic-precaution nonsense for the two damn years, and this is just one more example.
"Oh, if you're young and healthy there's no danger! It's just a flu! Your mask is cowardice! Open the nation! The 'rona only kills the old, weak, and sick! Freedooooommmmm!"
Now...I'll be the first to say; the CDC director was a fool to say this, because they should know that these gomers will pick up on it and loudly bray all the above and demand we surrender (even more than we have already...).
But what the CDC is saying here was - and note that this quote is deceptive, because the CDC director was speaking of deaths among the fully vaccinated - in effect, that "if you wear your seatbelt properly when you're involved in an accident you would have to be smashed by a fully-loaded heavy haul truck that forces your vehicle off the road, down a 100-foot-high vertical cliff into a flaming nuclear waste repository to be killed in that crash."
That's good news! It means that the vaccines are doing what they're supposed to do. That means we SHOULD be vaccinating everyone and anyone and their cat to make sure we slam the door closed on this virus like we did with the Salk and Sabin vaccines against polio.
Now...I understand that people with all those health problems are not happy about this, the CDC saying, in effect, that they're a lost cause.
But public health is about the public in general. It isn't ever going to be about keeping every swinging richard alive and well. It's reducing the hazard to 99.X% of the public.
Cruz, and every other Republican - including Chief Justice Roberts and the Furious Five, unfortunately - don't care about this. They're effectively on the "side" of the virus, and so long as they are we will continue in the damn Plague Year.
GOP delenda est.
It's really that simple...and that impossibly difficult.
One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to.
It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.
Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.
So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.
You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.
It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.
Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.
So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).
The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.
The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.
I'm all in, anyway.
Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)
One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.
Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.
But this is where the GQP is now.
What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.
Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.
Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.
You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."
No.
The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.
Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.
That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.
And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.
Well...shit.
Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble.
I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.
So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.
So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.
Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:
It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:
"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."
So. Here's the thing.
NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.
Think about that.
A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.
As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.
Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.
But.
Here's the thing.
I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!
To which I simply reply:
You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?
You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.
No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.
Kitchen closed. Boom.
And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.
I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!
Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.
I'm SO fucking done with these people.
There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.
Had a chat with Chief Schrum down at the TMC today. Based on this I understand that there's a hard nut of you GI Joe Real American heroes that have been passing on this Plague vaccination.
Chief says that y'all got a shit-ton of reasons why y'all ain't gonna get a teeny-weeny little prick and no, Private Black, that is not a personal observation and I see no reason for you to give me that look. You and me, after this formation.
Notregardless, here's the straight dope, gentlemen.
There's a minefield out there.
Now on the one hand, seeing as you know that said minefield is out there but have no way of telling where it is, or how fucked up it is, or whether or when one or more of you might wander into it, you can do it one way. Let's call it...let's see...oh, yeah, let's call it the "Dumb Fucking Way".
You can just bumblefuck around until you get into it.
And once therein you will discover you have fucked around and found out. Some of you will wander out again just fine.
Some of you won't.
Or.
There's another way. Let's call this one the "Let's Not Just Wander Into The Fucking Minefield" way.
You can accept the issue of things that will give you a better chance in case you find yourselfs in the minefield. Things like this little paper mask thing that makes you look all sexy like the girls in the Candy Striper movie that I found S&T Platoon watching on the dayroom TV again having already reminded you that said TV is in a location accessible to family members including minor dependents and their mommies and no, Specialist Gutierrez, "that's how you make children" is not sufficient justification for the three days of phone calls I got after that particular incident thankyewverymuch.
You can get the vaccination which is kind of like those big ol' EOD suits that keep you from being blown into small independent republics if the mine does go off.
These fucking things are there not just to help you but to help the people around you who can't use them, like little kiddos and your aged granny who's on chemo for the third time because she's hooked on Swisher Sweets.
And here's the thing.
Knowing all this, if you refuse to take advantage of all these useful items and get stuck in the minefield, hopefully it will not surprise you if those of the rest of us who have are a trifle unsympathetic to your ass.
"Freedom", gentlemen, is not "license". "Freedom" is a combination of rights and responsibilities that we as citizens agree to in order to form a more perfect fucking union.
You do not have the freedom to go prancing out into the minefield and bring back a mine to the mess hall which reminds me to discuss that stuff you had the utter gall enough to describe as "vegetarian lasagne", Mess Section, at some point between now and dinner chow.
So quit dicking around, people. Get the goddamn shot.
Because ain't nobody here going into the minefield after you if you don't.
Charlie Pierce hands his joint over to an ER doc in the middle west who tells us of how the modern peasantry is dealing with the infection of the modern Great Plague:
"Had several people come in with symptoms or just to be tested. Mostly
younger than 40. Of course zero vaccinations, and when I asked why, I
don’t get the “cause the internet, cause screw the libs, I think it’s
dangerous” excuses. I don’t get any excuses at all. They just shrug
their shoulders and say they didn’t need it. It’s just part of their
psyche now. Sun rises in the east, Jesus will return to judge the quick
and the dead, you just don’t get vaccinated."
Now. I get that these people didn't come up with this weapons-grade stupid all by their ownselves. Every talking head they listen to, from fucking Trump all the way down to skeevy broadcast pimps like Tucker Carlson, is filling their fat heads with this "you just don't get vaccinated" nonsense.
But I'm a right bastard and a member of the polio-and-smallpox generations. You have a pathogen? You get fucking vaccinated. Not for yourself alone, but because you live in a society, in a community, in a nation, and you owe all of them a duty not to be a completely selfish asshole.
So I am utterly done with these people. I have no pity. I have no mercy left in me. Having - as a 63-year-old at high risk of bad outcomes if infected - lived for a year under the shadow of this damn plague I am perfectly fine condemning them to death now that there is a light that lifts that shadow and these ignorant people refuse to step out into it.
They want to respond to a plague like 15th Century peasants?
Fine. They get 15th Century "treatment", then.
Put them on the death cart back to whatever shit-hovel they inhabit. Toss them inside. Nail the doors and windows shut and mark them with the red cross of Infection. Post the guards to shoot them if they try to emerge or shoot anyone who tries to free them.
And then let the disease take them.
Whoever remains alive in the month after the infection has run its course?
May be allowed to creep out into the daylight again to be reviled and cursed as the dangerous fools they are.
Damn these people, and damn the political party that is fostering them.
The new book Nightmare Scenariolimns a gruesome picture of the ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision inside a Trump administration confronted with a pandemic microbe several orders of magnitude better organized and more intelligent:
“One
of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no
one was in charge of the response,” Abutaleb and Paletta write. “Was it
Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force?
Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force
until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds,
rarely in sync?”
“Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless,” they conclude.
So...wait. We needed a whole book to tell us this?
The choice was to throw in a picture of Trump, or a picture of one of the Scoobies, and, duh, Velma is both way smarter and way-smokin'-hotter, so...
For fuck's sake. This bloated nincompoop pranced around on live television suggesting that the solution to an epidemic pathogen was bleach, shoving lights up your ass, and malaria drugs while ignoring every single piece of public health knowledge about epidemic pathogens developed since the fucking Plague of Athens.
Everyone outside the bubbling MAGAt kool-ade vat knows that the simple stooge couldn't have figured out what he was supposed to do, and if he was told to sit down, shut up, and follow his epidemiologists' instructions how to do it would have just dipped some crap out of his diaper and thrown it at them like the shit-flinging toddler he is.
This is the least-difficult mystery that Scoobies ever solved. Trump did it, regardless of where the bug came from or how or why. He was told that a deadly pathogen was coming - by the damn Chinese premier, forgawdssake, so it wasn't like the guy didn't know what he was talking about - and he was too shit-scared that his rating would tank to actually do what the South Koreans did.
The problem here doesn't seem to be that there's no way to tell how these things happened or who was responsible. Instead it's more magical thinking; I don't WANT it to be that way, so I won't believe it.
Speaking of the whole "where it came from",question related to this magical thinking is the whole "Wuhan lab leak COVID genesis" thing.
Frankly, it isn't something I'm particularly spun up about. We know that biolabs have killed people before...but so have - a lot more often - zoonotic pathogens. The chance that this is an intentional PRC bioweapon are vanishingly slim. For one thing, you develop the vaccine FIRST, so you don't end up killing shitloads of your own troops (Unit 731 is holding on Line 2...) with your own pathogen. For another, a bioweapon that kills old, sick people and is usually ineffective against healthy young ones? Not much of a weapon.
No. The probability is that this is just another in the long line of zoonotic South Asian pathogens in the great SARS/MERS/seasonal flu tradition.
But. Even if it's not, even if this is something that was cooked up by the tricksy Chinamen, that doesn't tell the story the MAGAts want it to.
Because a lab leak doesn't mean we get to sling a nuke at the PRC. Or even fight one of those good and easy-to-win trade wars against them.
For because the world is bound with strands of aircraft aluminum and kerosene aviation fuel it means that it's in our interests to ensure that we 1) know as much as possible about what's going on in Chinese biolabs, and 2) ensure that those labs are as well-designed, well-equipped, well-trained, and well- managed as possible. It means more, closer engagement with the loathsome government of the PRC, not less.
Well...dammit.
When it comes down to cases, I think we're seeing here the functional end of what happens when humans are confronted with difficult, complex, frightening things, especially when the hardscape around those things point towards conclusions those humans dread and fear.
If working through that country forces you to agree to and believe things that you hate with all your heart...it will make you happier not to believe them. If you can settle on a simple, clear answer - even a simple, clear wrong answer - that backs up your hopes and beliefs?
You'll go with that.
Problem?
Climates and pathogens and armed men don't care what you want to believe. If you get them wrong they'll kill you and all yours deader'n shit.
Governing yourself by whatever stupid thing you want to believe?
This was a mistake on the part of the Oregon Health Authority.
Despite my age, and my position as the Designated Geezer in a house with two kids in public school, I was not "eligible" per the Oregon vaccination schedule to get my Anti-COVID Armor until late-mid-April. Despite a fair sized chunk of the Oregon public, like the rest of the country, being unwilling to even GET this goddamn shot. Despite the simple epidemiological reality that the single best way to beat this bug is to get as many needles in as many arms as fast as possible...I should have been shit out of luck.
But.
The OHA has, at least, been willing to honor it's fuckup and not shot-block those of us who jumped on the chance to schedule this thing.
Y’know, I’m absolutely pleased that my son can have at least some of his senior year back at Roosevelt.
I’m excited that my daughter can see her freshman friends again.
I’m very, very glad that my wife working as the school secretary at
Astor Elementary is fully vaccinated against the return of students.
So it’s difficult to express how absolutely, completely,
incandescently furious I am that within a month these three will be
returning home from interacting with who knows how many COVID-infected
randos and bringing who knows how massive a viral load to me, who at 63
is NOT vaccinated and, more to the point, cannot GET vaccinated in time to escape the path through this fucking plague pit because my state government apparently considers me expendable if it means getting the schools open.
At least when I was a GI the Army got me a yellow fever shot before sending me out into the mosquito-infested cuna grass.
I checked everywhere. Under 65? Nope. "Multigenerational household"? Nope. There's just no route for me to get protected from this goddamn disaster. I just have to hope like hell my family doesn't bring home a round for the revolver as we begin to play "COVID Roulette" or dance to "The NoPo Minefield Tango"
I don’t expect anyone in the state government to do anything to help
me protect myself, since they obviously knew this would happen when they
reopened the schools in March rather than next fall and decided in a
very Trumpy way that satisfying the people who have been grousing about online teaching (which DOES suck, I get that...) was worth people like me “taking the (fucking)
punch”.
But it doesn’t make me any less furious at the whole pack of
sonsofbitches that after nearly a year of me being extra careful and doing all
the right public health things I was asked to do that this fucking COVID crapshoot is their gift
to me.
Sorry. I’m more than a bit irked with my supposed “leaders” at the moment.
More Americans dead from COVID-19 than were killed in combat in the three worst wars the nation fought in the 20th Century.
What's the most appalling part of this is how utterly, completely, shockingly pointless all these deaths were. How much we could have done to prevent them, compared to how little we actually did.
If you see the minefield and you don't have to go into the minefield, don't fucking go into the fucking minefield.
There's no reason we had to kill all those people. Some will have died no matter what we did. But we could have saved probably hundreds of thousands had we followed the simple public health precautions we knew we should have and other polities like Japan and South Korea did.
But instead here we are, with an unconscionably large portion of the U.S. public convinced by their idiotic civic religion that those precautions are some sort of jackbooted oppression. Another, possibly overlapping, portion is going to refuse to be vaccinated.
I honestly don't know what to say about this other than what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Krugman has a tweet up talking about Trumpy Bear and the Plague Year:
"A couple of takeaways from this shocking-but-not-surprising description of Trump's refusal to deal with the pandemic. First, character does matter: he's a terrible president in part because he's a horrible person.
Second, his self-absorption was self-destructive: politicians who took the virus seriously were rewarded even when they weren't that successful."
He's right, of course. The nightmare we're living through - those of us who WILL live through it, and damn near half a million may not, when it's all done with us - is entirely the creation of fucking Tubby and the idiot fucking Republican cult. Those places where the people and the leadership did the things that simple public health suggested would limit the losses due to a pandemic disease are doing fine.
We're an utter shitshow.
So I just wanted to remind those here that I was on thiswaaaaay back in April:
"And here's the really infuriating part.
It SO didn't have to be this way.
What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and
his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.
I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men...who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.
All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done.
Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice
to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care.
Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation.
Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.
I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done
this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal
money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of
build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and
helmets.
Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.
That's it.
That's ALL.
He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years
after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is
up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.
But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.
HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat
brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power,
to sate his ginormous ego.
THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their
bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where
cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks
and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a
dog could resist licking its ass.
That's just...sad.
Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as
the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be
the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to
the nation in time of trial.
And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine,
try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by
dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.
And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve."
I'm a fairly smart person, but it's not often that I'm that far ahead of the punditorial power curve, and I wanted to shake my moneymaker briefly to note that in this case I sure as hell was.
And don't mistake me; there's a shit-ton of others outside of Orange Foolius who bite off a piece of this clusterfuck.
The entire government of the PRC, that knew they had a deadly pathogen loose in Wuhan but tried to hide and dissemble about it.
Every knucklehead who had to have their wedding or barbeque or beach party regardless of the risk.
But for us here in the US, it was the goddamn brick-brained Chief Executive who:
1) Knew this was going to be bad way the hell back in the winter of 2020 because Xi himself told him so, but
2) Lied about it and either did nothing or actively worked to ensure the spread would get out of control, and
3) Could have done the exact opposite, but didn't, even though doing the exact opposite was so blatantly the obvious route to heroic re-election that it was blindingly obvious to an elderly blogger in Portland Fucking Oregon way the hell back in the early spring.
Not that it really helps you, me, or anyone else, that I was righter than Cassandra and Krugman and Trump altogether.
So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!
The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being - even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! - an "anarchist jurisdiction".
But...remember back in June?
When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that "policing" in the United States fucks with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of "reform" had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?
And I answered my own question with:
"I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis
for decades...I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB
that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on
the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard
to the ground, and start over?
Will we do anything about those problems now?
Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and
gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch,
we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you
think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way
we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and
everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?
Nope. I got nothin' for you on that."
And, as surely as the sun still rises, we - we here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland did...
Nothing.
Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the fucking cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad - another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left - and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.
Do the math.
Fuck. We're our own worst goddamn enemies.
So the end result of all that protesting and voting and clamor for justice is that we're stuck with the same bunch of useless bastards that sat around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses while the Portland coppers went all kinetic on the BLM protestors.
Surely as the sun rises even the hardest-core street radical can see the brutal facts in front of her, so the protests drizzled away with the autumn rains.
The summer of BLM is over and the fucking cops won.
The usual suspects - the rich white people in the West Hills and the Portland Business Alliance - voted for the empty suit in droves, terrified of the propaganda spewed by the Thin Blue Line of Bullshit and the idiot news stations.
The same idiots are fulminating about our homeless explosion - imagine, people are losing their squats in a Plague that is killing businesses and low-wage jobs! Whoodathunkit? - and want the empty suit and his cronies to "do something"...as if anyone can "do something" without a massive infusion of tax dollars and social and actual engineering - build cheap goddamn houses, you fools! - that the richie riches and the PBA will never accept or agree to.
Which will just mean more "homeless sweeps" where the coppers kick the hoboes out of wherever they are. They will just rise and scatter like a flock of scruffy starlings to land in someone else's tree until the sweeps come through again. It's the homeless version of the whack-a-muj that worked soooo well in Southwest Asia only with fewer command-detonated mines.
Nobody is willing to think their way out of this, largely because the actual stuff that works is difficult and expensive and time-consuming and even here in Portland we're Americans, by God, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. Fuck that noise, we're cowboys and we think with our six-shooter.
Meanwhile we're marinating in the Plague just like the rest of you, and our wingnuts are as wingnutty as the ones all over the country, squawking and clucking about freeedummmmm!!! while the 'rona tickles their nostrils and they strut around with their festering uncovered meatfaces belching their disease all over the rest of us. The dumb fuckers have invited Mister Grenade to the party while the rest of us try to just stay in cover long enough to duck their goddamn shrapnel until the vaccines arrive.
I'm just tired.
I'm tired of the Plague. I'm tired of missing my old life; my friends and my little joys and my city, tired of being worried and afraid and nervous as a cat around crowds, wondering which one is the fucking numbnuts is that's walking around shedding the virus like rain.
And I'm really tired of this country, which has such a bright and shining promise, which has the potential to be so good and great and one but instead is dominated by the selfish, the small, the weak, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant.
I'm tired of trying to be decent and intelligent and thoughtful and careful and judicious only to look across the way at a bunch of four-year-olds squalling in a tantrum triggered by belief in utter nonsense so transparently obvious delusional foolishnessthat even a poop-flinging monkey would sneer.
And I have no good and happy answer to how to change all that except the answer of any siege; watch and wait and keep my head down and kill the traitorous bastards trying to open the postern and try and ensure that the other sonsofbitches don't get over the wall all the while knowing that it's usually us who get blown up by our own goddamn petard.
One of my "additional duties" here at the little house that is the Fire Direction Center is Assistant S-4 (Class I resupply) along with Mess Sergeant.
As such every weekend I do the marketing.
This morning I went to the ####### - I'll leave the name of the grocery off so as to preserve the anonymity of the person in the picture above - and there she was, looking drop-dead gorgeous in her "grocery outfit" complete with killer heels, skinny jeans, shirred-silk blouse, and pearls.
She was visibly a cut above the rest of us hoi-polloi in our scruffy jeans (or worse, pajama bottoms - I still don't get how you think it's okay to go out in public in pajamas. Seriously?) and go caps and the other shabby, bulky, utilitarian cold weather clothing that explodes across the Portland basin in late autumn.
When I came upon her, though, she was crossly surveying the desolate shelf-spaces in the "toilet paper" section. The COVID re-lockdown orders coming tomorrow in both Oregon and Washington states seem to have brought out the usual "OMFG-I'm going-to-be-wiping-my-ass-with-fallen-leaves!!!" nitwits who have begin hoarding the bog roll again. The woman was not happy.
So
as seemingly out-of-place madam's outfit was, I totally get the fuck-me pumps - not so much a statement as a weapon.
When you come limping
up to the checkout it's because the one that was on your bare foot is buried
in the heart of that fucking Charmin-hogging bitch lying back there in Aisle
Eight.
Here's your Plague Year writ small, small as a scroll made from quilted Northern; two shoppers enter. One shopper leaves.
The past several weeks have put me in strong mind of the images recently coming out of the coast of the Levant.
Because here I sit, quiet in the gray light of earliest morning, with my coffee and my hands lit by the phosphor-brightness before me untroubled by more than the usual reminders that my body has been here for sixty-two years and I have not treated it kindly.
My family are all still asleep...no, wait; I do have another early waker, the Big Cat, Drachma. He's our sniper-scout, authorized to roam the AO without specific direction, and he takes advantage of that with characteristic feline ruthlessness. His junior partner, little Nine, has too many physical issues for me to feel comfortable with that; she has to be "walked" during her much-demanded expeditions outdoors.
Here they are together on the east deck:
You'll notice the craftily-synchronized tail-wagging. I'm informed that is likely to be proposed as a demonstration sport for the 2021 Olympics, assuming that my country is even capable by next summer of sending representatives.
Sorry. Got sidetracked by cats again. Damn critters, they're like that.
Anyway...my point is that the Fire Direction Center is a quiet place.
My kids are poised to return to Virtual School in less than a month - Portland Public has decreed online-only until the new year - which as a former teacher and parent I find appalling but as a sixty-two-year-old highly unexcited about the possibility of one of my progeny returning from school with a massive viral load of the novel coronavirus am kinda fine with.
My Bride, likewise, is preparing to return to her job as Miss Debra, School Secretary (which, by the way, isn't nearly as fun as it might have been fifteen years ago. I'm not saying we've reached the post-roleplay stage of our sexual lives, but we have gotten to the point where "too much like work" is a genuine factor. Sorry if that's TMI, but, there you have it...) and seems to be willing to be cautious about it.
My job, while incorporating entirely too much boring grunt-level dirt-nanny bullshit work, is still here. My outfit seems to be managing to hang on to clients, and we haven't been seeing - at least, not yet - the shutdown or suspension of backlog work.
And I'm...okay. Getting out to do some of the things I enjoy, diverted by the return of Portland soccer, reading a crap-ton, exercising, trying to stay as healthy and mentally and emotionally sound as I can; this is from a recent nautical adventure on Columbia Slough, with the Bride as Pirate Queen.
The only personal drawback is my physician has ordered me to cut back to less than a single beer or dram a day and no more than four or five a week! - and that's cruel hard for someone who likes the drink taken as much as I do.
I find I've resorted to finding bizarre beverages to sample in hopes that a single draft will be enough.
And, yeah, this one surely was. Ugh.
So from the promontory where I stand? Yeah, things are well enough.
And, yet, when I look beyond that, it's more like this:
The Senate Republicans and the White House - that is, the "governing" pieces of the GOP, if you can call governing what they do - have given up trying to keep to the inside of the fog lines and simply let the nation, the public, and the economy drive off a goddamn cliff.
There's no urgency. There's no plan. Except "it is what it is". At least the House Democratic caucus proposed something, a legitimately-WW2-level response to what is an extinction-level epidemiological event. The fucking GOP?
Nothing. Let them die, God will recognize his own. Apparently that's all we're gonna get from the Pary of Personal Responsibility.
The states and cities budgets are going to crater. The death toll is going to keep rocketing up. People - most people, I can't speak for MAGAts - aren't stupid enough to dice with Death if they don't have to; they're not going to flock into IKEA and Cracker Barrel and Spencer Gifts (are there any "Spencer Gifts" left anymore, outside zombie enclosed shopping malls..?) so restaurants and bars and little shops and businesses are going to collapse.
One of my favorite little soccer bars, the Toffee Club down on Hawthorne, tried to reopen under the "Phase 1" rules back in late June. Much as I enjoy sharing a pint and a match I had no interest in going maskless to share recycled air with random strangers in the Plague Year. I didn't go, lots of people didn't go...and so now they're closing again.
That's...very saddening.
And pointless. Utterly uneeded. For a tiny fraction of the money that went to Amazon and Yeezy and Untuckit this little bar could have kept playing until we have a vaccine or effective treatments, another year or two.
But, no.
And I won't even bother to discuss the baboon-assed jackanapes in the Oval Office. We all know that he's useless in this pandemic as a tampon in a typhoon, except to spread lies and bullshit and disinformation and propaganda for his BFF Vladimir. Oh, and golf. That may be his most egregious personal wrong; he's taken a game my father the Master Chief loved and was damn good at, a game I sort-of appreciated, and made me utterly loathe because of his ties to it.
So here I sit, watching, appalled, as roughly four of ten of my supposed-countrymen roar and bay and lust for this bloated fool, for this ridiculous abdication of responsibility and sanity, and while they do the supposed free press refuse to put their thumbs on these people - both the MAGAts and their tin gods, the Cottons and Mnuchins and McConnells and, of course, Il Douche - for that insanity and irresponsibility and stupidity.
And...so than, what?
Vote?
Sure as hell, yes I'm going to campaign and vote against every one of these sonsofbitches. Starting right here in Portland, where the combination of a worthless Police Bureau and the worthless Mayor who's humping them, need to go
But I live in safely Blue Portland. There's nothing I can to to stop the chucklefucks in Cornhole, Texas and SisterWife, Tennessee (with the help of Trump's people and the GRU...) from inflicting this lunatic graft and corruption and plutocracy and stupidity on me and my family and my Blue Portland for another interminable four years.
It's maddening. It helps me understand rebellions and the construction of guillotines; when the rulers and their partisans show they don't care if you live or die, well...then it becomes you or me, jack, and I'm gonna make sure it's you if I can.
But...all I have is a vote, and a voice, and a keyboard.
(And, if it comes to that, an old bolt-action rifle, one magazine, and 120 rounds of ammunition, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.)
And that's arrayed against millions of moronic MAGAts. Fox "News". Page after page of bothsider Quisling press. The fucking GRU! The weight of the Executive Branch, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.
Even if Trump loses in November - and even if he concedes without him and his MAGAts picking an actual physical fight, which I am thoroughly unsure they won't - all those other noxious weeds will remain, determined to choke with religion and racism and oligarchy what I had thought were the growing trunks of the Trees of Liberty; secular science, equity, comity, equal justice under law.
Much of the time I feel like Smokey the Bear, clinging to my smouldering and shuddering Cascadia douglas-fir, alone at the top of the ridge, whilst all around me all the forests in the nation are burning to the ground.
It is difficult to articulate the inchoate rage and impotent frustration I feel as I read and watch my nation throw itself headfirst into the fucking COVID minefield.
Largely because, as I explained early on in this pandemic, it didn't have to. We the People and our national government have dealt with these sorts of huge national emergencies before. We know how to deal with them in ways that minimize the danger to the general public while still accomplishing the mission.
Instead, largely because the federal government in this timeline is run by fucking grifters, fools, and rabid Randite ideologues, we've managed to screw the COVID pooch like the smallest dog in the dog pound to the point where we're going to kill tens and probably hundreds of thousands of us, uselessly, while still destroying the national wealth and further detonating the political commons.
And the most infuriating part about this is that those of us who are doing "the right thing"; masking, staying apart, reducing our contacts and being prudent...are completely helpless in the face of the remainder of our people who are just completely fucking useless.
It's like, and excuse me if I drag Acting 1SG Lawes into this, you're the topkick and you have been savagely on your outfit, forcing the joes to dig in deep, to emplace the overhead cover, to pull security while doing all that, aggressively patrolling and wiring and mining your defense. And then you look to the companies to your left and right and they're just standing around with their collective thumbs up their collective ass and their brains in neutral, lolling around like queens, and basically just begging the enemy to pound the shit out of them with artillery and run through them like a dose of salts.
Was it Caligula that said something about wishing that the world had just one neck, so he could choke the life out of it?
Not that looney Romans are particularly great role-models, but that's how I feel as I watch helplessly as numbnuts all around me, ranging from the Chief Executive to rando wingnut whackjobs, prance around maskless in public meeching about freedom and liberty and not living in fear.
Fear, you stupid sonsofbitches? You're supposed to fear things like the enemy's artillery and getting overrun. They can fucking kill you.
That's why you dig in and interlock your fields of fire and lay out the wire. So you live through the next attack.
And any GI will tell you; it takes every GI doing all this stuff to make it work.
One company. One platoon dicking off, and the enemy is inside your perimeter grenading you in your holes and shooting you in the back.
And here we have entire states, and a huge portion of the entire nation, doing the equivalent of pouting because digging in deep is haaaaard and the wire cuts your fingers and, anyway, the enemy isn't really dangerous after all, right, so who needs to dig in and patrol and do all those nasty Army things, anyway? When we could be going to bars and beaches, amirite?
And there's not a damn thing I can do about that, and it's driving me up the fucking wall.
The little phrase above translates as "take off the helmet". It has passed into Japanese idiom from the feudal period as meaning "admit defeat", or "surrender".
We the People have surrendered to the Plague, and, being a Plague, it will respond by killing thousands and tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of its' prisoners.
Because that's literally what plagues do.
It doesn't have to be this way.
I get that we can't stay locked down forever. People got no jobs. People got no money. People are going to have to get out and work...and that means they'll want to get out and play, too. And, being American and greedy and stupid, we don't "get" that we just can't go back to Dave and Buster's like we did before and not get the Plague.
But.
There are ways to get out, and ways to get out. We seem to have decided to get out the stupidest and most infectious way possible. We're mobbing back into public spaces and, most critically, breathing our infections on each other. Because, it seems, less-stupid-and-infectious would include one simple and effective way to do this better.
Wear a fucking facemask.
"Japan’s population is about 38% of the U.S., but even adjusting for population, the Japanese death rate is a mere 2% of America’s. This comes despite Japan having no lockdown, still-active subways, and many businesses that have remained open—reportedly including karaoke bars, although Japanese citizens and industries are practicing social distancing where they can. Nor have the Japanese broadly embraced contact tracing, a practice by which health authorities identify someone who has been infected and then attempt to identify everyone that person might have interacted with—and potentially infected. So how does Japan do it?"
It's really that simple.
Japan has a longstanding tradition of masking in public.
I've been out and about during the Plague because of my job. Almost no one is masked; easily less than half, and (except in places like the whole foods store) usually about a quarter. I am...but it doesn't help me. I don't have the Plague yet; I need the other people, who do, to cover their nasty diseased pieholes.
And what I hate about that is that a hell of a lot of that has a hell of a lot to do with this:
The Trumpkins are explicit in refusing to cover their faces during a plague because it's not manly, it's not "free", it's sissy...aw, fuck, who cares why. They're goddamn idiots and if they were only killing themselves they could happily go to hell in the same handbasket.
But they're not. They're killing you and me.
So maybe we're going about this all wrong.
Maybe what we need for these chucklefucks is this sort of mask:
Would all these heroes mask up if they could strut around behind a é¢é ¬, a menpÅ, like a badass samurai?
I'm long past trying to reason with these numbnuts. If giving them a cool ninja mask would make them stop acting stupid?
Works for me.
But, sadly, no. It won't work.
Because the proudly ignorant sonsofbitches wouldn't do it. Not even for a badass samurai mask. Because they'd prefer to burn the place to the ground rather than do anything that might make some pussy lib'rul somewhere smile.
This is what they think wearing a mask means:
That's really it. That's all there is to it. I mean...look at the damn idiot cartoon. "I want safety, not freedom" Wha...freedom to catch the fucking plague? "I want medical tyranny"...medical...the fuck?
Just look at it.
There's no logic there, no sense, no real reasoning. It's just all loud-n-proud fuckyew! because we're a house completely divided, and if they can't do exactly what they want and tell us pinko commie lib-simp cucks to suck it, they'll dynamite that fucker and dance on the ruins.
