Explain To Me How Your Inconvenience Is More Important Than My Life

I had someone this week tell me that, "Well, they were only originally predicting 200,000 deaths and that even without the self-quarantines and other 'extreme' measures, some are saying the death numbers would have been about the same either way." The theory being that we were all exposed before the flu manifested itself in China. My friend further speculated that the shut down did nothing to minimize the spread of this flu. According to the latest conspiracy theory, most of us were exposed in October and November of 2019. And my friend further argued that there is one study that shows the main exposure & sickness happens in households when families stay inside for longer periods of time. In other words, if you stay home you are more likely to get sick.
At this point I take a deep breath before refusing to bow before hindsight looking for something to bitch about.  Let me take this argument point by point.

1. The 200,000 deaths number is appalling anyway you look at it. And that number was suggested before doctors discovered that this particular virus made you contagious up to two weeks BEFORE you even knew you had it. So you're running around like individual CoVid-19 Marys infecting everyone you know and quite a few folks you don't know. After this was known estimates jumped into the millions of deaths without some kind of drastic measures being taken. After the travel ban and self-quarantines were initiated, the rate of infection slowed dramatically.
2. The argument that we all had the flu in October and November is a purely agenda-based conspiracy theory passed around by people with cabin fever. That the flu was loose in the US that early is really wild speculation. A lot of folks had flu last fall and not coincidentally after taking this year's flu vaccine. We were warned it might make us sick and it did. A friend told me that after this year's flu shots in Texas prisons, a lot of the inmates had mild to moderate cases of the flu. My wife and I both had flu-like symptoms after we took the flu shot before flying to Texas. Sometimes the vaccine gives you a mild to moderate case of flu depending on how strong the flu virus it's designed to fight. There's even been some anecdotal evidence that this year's vaccine helped protect some people from a mild exposure to CoVid-19. Thinking that we should have done nothing to address such a very virulent virus strain is taking risks with a lot of lives and I believe is irresponsible to suggest..
3. If you think because you are young and healthy and not in the virus's kill zone, that you're hurting no one but yourself if you catch it, you are truly delusional. It's like the anti-vaccine folks who say, if your kid has taken the vaccines, why should you worry if my kid catches it? What they don't take into account is that every time an epidemic goes through the human population, it mutates and becomes something a little different. Does anyone want to play revolving vaccines with smallpox, diptheria, measles, mumps or rubella? Do we really want to expose pregnant women to the measles outbreak among the unvaccinated rich Democrats, conspiracy theorists and illegal aliens?  My baby brother Craig died because we gave Mom the measles while she was pregnant with him. I don't want to see the annual death tolls from infectious deceptively named "childhood" diseases.
4. Finally, the snowflakes, conspiracy theorists and habitual whingers have complained that this whole thing is a big plot to do everything from converting the USA into a socialist state, a Nazi state with President Trump as dictator, or a communist state ruled by China. And this vast conspiracy was concocted all to prevent them from cruising the bars, having sex on the beaches and attending concerts, raves and mass protests where you get laid afterward. Conspiracy theorists are so much fun to jerk around. They will believe anything that makes them the victims of the evil forces that they firmly believe rule the world.  Sorry guys. neither the gray aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Big Pharma nor the Reptiloids from Dimension 9 are out to cramp your hard partying style. The truth is that even the politicians that are trying to be in control aren't really in control. Nobody is in control unless you're a Christian claiming Romans 8:28.

Well, excuse me if you've been inconvenienced by precautions that have been taken (mostly voluntarily) to stop the spread of this stuff. I'm 66 years old. I've got crippling arthritis thanks to a life of doing good things that happened to have battered my joints. I take handfuls of pills to control my blood sugar and my blood pressure. I do exercises that hurt like all git-out!

Even then, despite the nearly constant pain and difficulty getting around because I'm living on a fixed income, I find that I am singularly uninterested in being killed off by suffocation by the coronavirus because some snowflake passed it around because he felt unhappy about taking precautions around people who were old and therefore of no value to him!!!!! And I find young people who live outside the CoVid-19 kill zone to be incredibly self-centered when they whine about not being allowed to risk everyone's life by spreading this stuff to tens of millions of their fellow human beings.
 I was hoping to meet Jesus in the air when he comes and miss out on the whole death business. So I'd rather not be killed by a virus I got from some self-centered snowflake who wasn't worried about passing around a disease that kills older people like me thank you very much.

The fact that it's not 200,000 dead or worse with a virus infinitely more contagious than our regular garden-variety flu, tells me what we've done is working. Why can't America ever do something right with the conspiracy crowd? Always looking for someone to blame. It was America's fault the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. The Jihadis wouldn't have attacked the world trade center if we hadn't been richer than they are and hadn't been helped by President Bush. And on and on and on.

I think when we get opened back up and the economy recovers, we should take a victory lap. We know now that the virus came from the lab in Wuhan and that our previous administration pumped a lot of money into research into bat flu at that very lab which already was notoriously inept at security. We know China bought up tons of personal protective gear early on leaving other countries having to do emergency manufacturing while their people were dropping like flies. Italy didn't worry about taking measures to protect themselves and look where that got them. If we'd been hit like countries that ignored it, we'd have done 200K and probably better. I thank God it was Trump making those decisions and not some conspiracy theorist or (worse) Hillary Clinton.

Buck up, Buttercup! We're saving you from yourselves.

© 2020 by Tom King

Here Among the Nuts

The trouble with being a nut is that you are a similar shape as other nuts and you all tend to roll into the same corners when things get shaken up. I find myself in the company of an odd assortment of lovely, rugged individualists -- opinionated the lot of them, well-read (I almost said "educated' but then given the unipolar structure of modern education these days "educated" can mean a lot of things). They are, however, for the most part, fair fighters. Oh, we've had some brouhahas, but without the typical animus you see in the press and on social media lately. We tend to argue until someone runs out of facts or energy or witty comebacks. We throw memes at each other, but most of us don't hate each other - at least not those who have rolled into the corners I frequent since the great shaking of 2016.

Mostly it's a vicious Marxist sort of snide cracks and jibes (Groucho Marxist that is). One finds out rather quickly who can't stand the heat. They abandon the kitchen and try to lock the door behind themselves. Only to find, of course, that the door only locks from the inside and most of us are in favor of leaving the door unlocked so that new material may drift back in once in a while to give us subjects for our weblogs and memes.

You know, like Trump pressers, Biden speeches, AOC tweets, or Pelosi tantrums. This past week has been an embarrassment of riches for conservatives as the boys at Right Angle called it.

I think what this is, may be the inevitable row couples get into sometimes when something has been wrong but nobody wants to talk about it. We're polite to each other while the problem festers until things blow up. Then, we either get a divorce or we apologize, have sex and make up. Nations don't actually have sex. Usually they have an all out war and then everyone's fine for a while. It can't be these little gropey brushfire shootouts either. It's make the danged declaration and then go unload your carriers on them, roll out the tanks, send over the B-2s.  I hope we don't have to have a bloody knock down, drag out with Russia or China or the whole Middle-East. It's unlikely I think. Russia has the sense to know it's badly outclassed and that we've got another one of those cowboy presidents. That scares them enough to give pause. China may be in the process of eliminating themselves with their own bio-weapons, and the Middle East couldn't get organized enough to pick someone to head up the committee to throw a falafel-themed potluck dinner.

I'm a pessimist about the fate of the world. For the first time in history, we have the technology to turn our nations into puddles of glass and we have the lunatics in positions of power who would push the necessary buttons. I figure we'll one of these days, argue ourselves into a giant nuclear orgasm at which time Jesus will come round collecting baskets full of nuts from those those stray corners they've rolled into, before they get over-roasted.

 © 2020 by Tom King (excerpt from my comment on "Random Thoughts by Mark Milliorn)

Socialism - Always a Surprise When You Open the Pretty Package!

Progressives will tell you how terrible it is that the minimum wage is not a "living" wage.

Well, duh! 

Low wage jobs available to unskilled laborers were never intended to be a living wage. Entry level wages are intended to be what they are - entry level pay for entry level jobs. These are jobs requiring little skill, training or experience. They get you in the door while you are in high school, college or just starting out so you can learn how to work, teach you how to manage money and give you some experience to put on your resume'.

The Progressive so-called "minimum living wage" proposes to force the economy to adjust itself to provide better money for people with no skills. The trouble is that with the higher bottom end wages, employers can offer no real incentive to entry level employees to do what they need to do to improve their circumstances.  Worse yet, it provides a disincentive to people who DID work hard to get that increase into living wage country, because employers find themselves unable to provide financial incentives to their ambitious employees without raising prices on the customers. And when they do inevitably raise prices for the consumers, the increased costs cause cascading inflation and prices go up enough to negate the raises the so-called "living" wage provided. Once again, thanks to inflation, the living wage becomes no longer a living wage and what was once a living wage becomes the equivalent to the former minimum wage and nobody is doing any better.

Ironically, the artificially inflated minimum wage winds up damaging the very people it purports to care about. It promotes inflation, raises prices on goods and services, closes small businesses, restaurants, small transportation and delivery companies, and such.. Centrally planned governments have to eliminate diversity, particularly business diversity in order to cope with their own bureaucratic paperwork. The more individual members of an economy, the more paperwork the bureaucracies generate for each other and the more bloated the government bureaucracy becomes.

Socialism favors, not mom & pop business, but massive corporations. Why? Because it's much easier to manage the integration of a a few massive corporations into the government planned economy than it is to manage millions of small entrepreneurial businesses into the government's economic schemes. Progressive socialism as it turns out, tends to kill local small business despite their pro-local rhetoric. Bureaucrats, always looking to ease their workload create economies that only work if all business is big business. Easier to manage that way.

It's like that whole, "You have to pass the bill before we can show you what's in it" business.

Socialism! Always a surprise when you open the pretty package!

© 2020 by Tom King