Coronavirus: Miles away from ordinary.

The donuts and lottery entries were backdated; I'm a little annoyed the $50 wasn't.

 

Maybe some Newport’s and a 4loko.

Between the amount of people who will break their necks walking on milk crates and those who eventually die refusing the vaccine or eating cattle dewormer, maybe we can just wait it out a little.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/del...-200-fees-if-they-dont-get-covid-vaccine.html

Delta swinging the stick today.

 

that's an interesting take. If it was as easy as that simple choice, which would you rather have:

Everyone get vaccinated and the pandemic goes away BUT trump gets 4 more years in 2024.... or the pandemic lingers, anti vaxxer craziness continues, but you don't have to worry about a big GQP turnout in 2022 or 2024 because they're all either unmotivated or dead at that point?

 

The Delta variant is making karma look like a real thing.

https://www.rawstory.com/lawyer-john-pierce/

 

Who could have predicted that? I'm shocked I tell ya.

 

If anyone can find me a headline that is purer distilled Trump-era than "Conservative Lawyer for Jan. 6 Defendants Who Formerly Represented Kyle Rittenhouse Is Reportedly on a Ventilator Due to COVID-19" I'll buy you a beer.

 

This feels like the philosophy question of how many stones makes a heap: at what point does a personal decision leap to a public health decision? We can draw this line in a zillion different places, but smoking isn't entirely a personal choice: if you smoke in an airplane, you're exposing people to your bad decision, thus it's not allowed. So, we as a society decided that if you smoke, you pay a LOT of taxes on it, and you can only do it in places that contain the effects of that decision to you. It's not popular, but most decisions made because of "ugh, other people" aren't. We just sort of agree this is as fair a measure as we can get to, and move on.

I disagree that a vaccine is a personal choice. I think that's very much a public health decision, just like taxes and traffic laws: if you want to be a part of society, you get a few jabs to avoid being a plague rat. Because we are in a relatively liberal society, we give some room for folks to opt out, for religious reasons, or for health reasons, and I think we tolerate some folks abusing this loophole. This is because not getting vaccinated has dire consequences: then the rest of society, literally every person you get within 12 feet of has to protect themselves from YOU. That doesn't balance out for the rest of us, especially since the most vulnerable group right now is children.

I'd have a lot more sympathy and respect for people not getting the vaccine if they had done something like consult with a doctor, as opposed to get prickly and defensive based on internet misinformation. Along those lines, a lack of sympathy for people who are dying from COVID-19 unvaccinated and pretending the vaccine has no consequences, and the government, or public health officials should be blindly trusted, isn't helping matters. That said, the "muh freedoms" crowd seems to do the least critical thinking when it comes to this, and I have the least respect/sympathy for their argument.

Bottom line for me is the people refusing to get vaccinated are putting children's lives at risk, in flagrant ignorance of overwhelmed pediatric wings, hospitals so flooded there are people dying in hallways, and people with medical needs dying needlessly because there's simply no capacity for them. If the decision is "your freedom" or my child's life, then fuck you with the horse you rode in on. We're over 700k dead since this began, with millions of people permanently impacted and millions more infected, with untold future consequences. The long-term implications for our already fucked healthcare system are beyond current reckoning.

If abortion is child murder, at what point is refusing a free miracle cure to one of the worst biological threats to emerge in modern times just as morally reprehensible? How many dead kids does it take to create an obligation?

How many stones does it take to become a heap?

 

Number is irrelevant as long as each stone is larger than the stones it rests on.

 

I can deal with another 4 of Trump, long as he's got a Dem Congress to hold his leash. It's the trumpist enablers that let him do the most damage.

EDIT: After he answers for the things he needs to answer for. No executive privilege mulligans.

 

100,000 hospital beds full of COVID right now, in places where they weren't exactly superfluous. I think it's important not to celebrate the deaths/demises of those who championed against COVID-19 countermeasures, it's still a loss.

The Biden administration is using language like "trusted community voices/leaders" to help locals find ways to encourage folks to get vaccinated. I can appreciate this sentiment, because a lot of the hesitance isn't based on misinformation, it's personally acquired anecdata: "My friend got it and her period is still fucked up." "My aunt got it and felt like shit." "My neighbor got it and he now has to shave a tail".

Part of the battle is realizing what and who these folks listen to. My parents are in the deepest of the deep red states, and couching the vaccine by saying "you can get it to protect your granddaughter, so she can go back to school" worked a hell of a lot better than stats or scientific explanations. Coming from me, who they trust and have seen the wear and tear of the pandemic on me as someone working it in a tangential fashion (I described my role as the librarian cataloging pieces of shit after a tornado hit the port-a-potties at Coachella....which is a bit more colorful than "shit storm administrator" I admit), they are inclined to believe me over Facebook, which has been a serious divide.

Some of the things companies are doing will make these folks unemployable, which I have very mixed feelings about. If you feel so strongly about a policy at your job, quit, that's fine. But don't expect unemployment, and to a larger extent, don't expect sympathy from anyone who doesn't share your nonsense. It scares me that it's become like an extreme religion: if you think your path to heaven involves magic underwear and refusing to get vaccinated, best learn how to fucking farm and homeschool, because the risk of including you in mainstream society outweighs the benefits. You can largely be left alone by the government if you so choose, but that comes with a price, and I think few of these people are willing to pay it, much less fully acknowledge it.

My ex lost her mom to COVID-19 and still won't get vaccinated, and I am scared shitless for her. Her brother works in healthcare, and has seen patients drop like flies. A few of our mutual friends work in hospitals, and are legit traumatized by what they've gone through. I've got one former staff of mine who's lost three family members in 3 months to it, last we spoke, 6 in total counting cousins. My grandmother died in June, never fully recovered from getting it in March, with complications from a stroke. My parent's tiny little church has lost about a dozen members, cutting across age groups.

It's not fair, and nothing will make it right. I'm strangely hopeful that the Internet having a long memory, and the hope that accountability for some of the abuse of social media in the form of misinformation, stock manipulation, and political interference will result in some folks being forever tainted by contributing to the 700,000 dead and millions more infected and forever scarred. If the court of public opinion can fuck someone over for homophobic tweets over a decade ago, then it will for sure remember the folks who spread lies and got people killed.

I'm curious if we'll see some civil suits emerge from this against Facebook, or individual users who spread lies, got people sick, people died and families litigate.

 

when went RVing a few weeks back our neighbor swore up and down by this. I had to look it up, hadn’t heard of it. What made it even more incredible was that his wife was an actively practicing nurse in Houston and is the one who suggested it to him.

Houston, what’s the fucking problem?

 

Because every single thing related to this pandemic has been poisoned with a partisan spin, the morons will do anything to prevent (what would be perceived in their own minds) a political win for the Dems. They’ve dug their heels in so long acting like covid isn’t really more than the flu, that they can’t suddenly change their minds and take it seriously now. They feel that would be humiliating. Because if the whole thing was reversed, and it was the Dems being stupid about the virus, they sure as shit would be making fun of them. It’s classic projection.

Instead of Republican governors, senators, and congress people pushing to keep their constituents alive, they are hoping to somehow transform this whole thing into a political win for themselves. Meanwhile, they are all vaccinated, their kids private schools require masks, and they are cashing in on stock from Gilead and Regeneron.