They’re here.

 

They’re here.

(Think Poltergeist.) 

Life in the Ozarks

            Life is cheap here in the Ozarks. The majority of people now dying are unvaccinated.

            A coroner in Missouri has been leaving Covid off of death certificates if the family objects. Even in death these people are in denial. Kind of amazing really. Others that are getting the vaccine only if they can do so in private so no one else will know. That way they can maintain their anti-vaxxer status. It’s a matter of have the right priorities.

            When they get Covid around here they like to go to parties. Nothing says loving caring friendship like giving Covid to others. If they go ahead and die it was “their time.” People wearing masks are few and far between. They have the unfettered freedom to kill others and it’s encouraged by Republicans.

Fundamental Divide

            It’s hard to talk about being lucky or dodging a bullet when we have 615,000 deaths from Covid-19 but it could have been far worse by now and if always Trumpers succeed it could end up being far worse yet. Several polls have now indicated that at least 30% of Republicans say that they won’t get the vaccine. A few hundred thousand dead aren’t enough to convince them that the nation is confronting a serious problem yet. Enough people aren’t dropping dead right in front of them.

Ignorance kills.

 The Herd

            This country will NOT get past 80% vaccinated. What that means is that there will be other more deadly variants that arise. Eventually one will pop that the vaccines won’t work for and a few hundred thousand more people will die needlessly. And that’s if the mortality rate stays under 5%. Otherwise we’re talking millions right here in America.

            In the beginning the Trumpers said that they were willing to accept the losses because they wanted “herd immunity.” They wanted herd immunity without vaccines or having to wear masks so that it would spread faster. That would have resulted in a couple of million deaths minimum Now that we have the actual option of achieving herd immunity through vaccinations they are opposing getting vaccinated thereby ruining the opportunity to achieve the herd immunity that they advocated originally.

Not enough people died for them

The variants are here.

            Every step of the way the always Trumpers have made the effects of the pandemic worse, far worse, than they needed to be resulting in a couple of hundred thousand needless deaths. Trump is gone but the always Trumpers are still at it. Even though his incompetence of handling the pandemic is a direct cause of him losing the election his incompetence lives on. He caused the deaths of too many people. Including too many of his own supporters.

            Variants of the corona virus continue to spread at an alarming rate caused in no small part by the ant-maskers still refusing to take the virus seriously. The longer that the virus is kept in widespread circulation the more likely it is that a more lethal variant that the vaccine does not provide protection from will arise. One such more lethal variant, the Delta variant, is already in circulation. So far it looks like the current vaccine still provides some protection.

Variants kill.

             The Republican pro-life death squads have locked us into a cycle of masking, vaccines and death for the next year. So, victory for them.

            On the plus side Big Pharma is going to make a killing.

So there’s that.

The Crazy Time

Crazy as defined by Merriam-Webster:

Not mentally sound. Marked by thought or action that lacks reason.

Whole new level of crazy.

            What a time to be living in!

            Dictionaries may have to rewrite the definition of crazy. Things that would have been considered exceptionally crazy in previous years only reach the level of being average or kinda’ crazy now.

            Everywhere the world is in flux. Everywhere. Politics. Culture. Religion. Art. Climate. Humanity.

            What’s happening?

            What’s rational?

            What isn’t?

            Have we seen times like this before?

            Has the world seen events like these before?

 Stating the observable.

            We are living in a worldwide pandemic that has killed a four million people so far. (It’s probably way more than that.)

            Political upheaval is almost everywhere. Even the countries that are considered stable are affected by all those that aren’t. Most of the South and middle Americas have suffering populations. Europe is being destabilized. Putin is on the move. The Koreas are a powder keg. China is rattling sabers in Asia. Africa is Africa. The Middle East continues to be a multi-alarm fire. India is in turmoil.

            Our ex-President is now our crazy ex-President. Another first. If he wasn’t crazy evil when he went into office, he qualifies now, after killing a few hundred thousand people needlessly, attempting a coup, encouraging civil war and trying to take out our Republic through ongoing sedition.

            Climate change is making everything worse by adding to all of the ongoing chaos.

Perspective

            We have seen times like this before. So has the world. The outcomes were always costly in terms of humanity and damaging to the planet Earth.

            The Spanish flu of 1918-19 killed 657,000 Americans and 50 million globally. (Estimates) They also had their anti-maskers. They didn’t have an anti-vaccine crowd because they had no vaccine. The flu just had to run its course. Populations were smaller then so that was a larger proportion.

            In World War II, depending upon what numbers you want to use, there were an estimated 60,000,000 deaths directly related to the war and another 20 or 30 million additional deaths indirectly related to the war by famine and disease. The figures are in dispute because there are some guesses that as many as 50,000,000 Chinese alone may have died due to the war. That would dramatically increase the number of casualties. This just serves to illustrate that deaths are usually under counted. Naturally Republicans maintain the opposite in spite of evidence.

            Arguably the times mentioned were worse. But these are the times that we’re living in. And they are far worse than they need to be. We shouldn’t have done worse than the Spanish Flu 100 years ago. They didn’t even have a vaccine then. Our supposedly modern society managed to not only repeat past history but compound the ignorance.

Where to from here?

            I don’t believe things will get crazier. I do believe that they will remain just as crazy. Conservative ‘Murica is going to kill a LOT more people. The anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, Republicans, Evangelicals and just the plain old-fashioned stubbornly ignorant aren’t going to change any time soon in regard to politics of civil war or the pandemic. It’s too late to go into another lock-down and frankly it wouldn’t work any better than it worked before. Fifty different responses to a pandemic is simply not the answer.

It’s just going to have to run its course.

CRT Hoax

Born to be

            Critical Race Theory (CRT) is like massive voter fraud or Sharia law being imposed upon the land or the pandemic is a hoax or climate change isn’t real or the Big Lie. It’s a Republican drum-beating non-issue that they sell to the awesomely gullible who are willing to believe anything that their party serves up for their consumption like the insurrection at the Capitol was just another day of tourism.

            While I’m at it, the only way that Trump could replace President Biden before the next election is if there is a successful coup d’etat. That he can somehow come back is something else his brainwashed followers believe even though there is no Constitutional provision for reinstatement of a President that LOST the election. These folks are NOT the sharpest tools in the shed. This is just another example of their truly impressively Olympic-level gullibility.

They high dived into the shallow end.

When everything old

            CRT is NOT new. It got its start back in the mid-70s and has become different things to different people. It started out with some American legal scholars and evolved from there. It does not make Americans hate America any more than our history of slaughtering the indigenous native population does. It’s our history just like slavery is a part of our history right along with working children in mines and denying women the vote. The Civil War is a part of our history as well. Republicans stand up for the monuments to the Confederate slavers. That’s the history they want glorified. CRT gets in the way of that. We shouldn’t glorify our racist history any more than Germans should glorify Hitler.

History teaches us possibilities.

            I’m not going to bother going into great detail about what CRT is and isn’t. It’s pointless. It is being taught in law schools and college level courses mainly because it gets real technical. There’s already all sorts of fake bullshit links on the internet just like all the anti-vaccine and anti-climate change garbage that’s out there. It's what Republicans do through the power of disinformation—a Trump favorite. In the opposition to CRT the right wing is portraying white people as the victims.

            What I personally find ironic is that CRT is critical of the approach of liberalism. (I’ll tell you right now that a lot of five dollar words are bandied about in this discussion.) Suffice it to say that Critical Race Theory deals with the historical racism and all of its manifestations that exists in this country and I no longer argue that there is no such thing as systemic racism. The preponderance of evidence is just too high.

I want finish up on a religious note.

Jesus wasn’t a racist. In this country he would be a victim of it.

 

Lunacy

Ka-ching!

            Ultimately it all costs money. What are the costs of the pandemic? Republican leadership professes to understand money. Exactly who is paying for the lunacy of the anti-vaxxers? The easy answer is—society does (we do).

No need

            In reference to vaccines I keep reading comments where people say “Do your research!” Admittedly I did a lot of research in the beginning way back when the pandemic first hit.

            One of the best responses that I read in regards to the ‘do your research’ comment was and I’m paraphrasing: “Don’t need to!” They pointed out that by now thousands of scientists from a variety of disciplines and a few billion dollars have been spent on doing just that. Research. Not just any scientists either but the tops in their respective fields. Respected, truthful, professional, honest people who care about humanity and saving lives.

That’s good enough for me.

Tune change

            Now since it’s mostly the unvaccinated (predominantly Trump supporters) who are getting Covid-19, the Republican leadership and right wing media have decided to say that people should get vaccinated after all. When it was seniors in nursing homes and minorities being impacted the most they were okay with no masking and getting everybody back to work. Now it’s their base being hospitalized and dying.

ON THE FLY

            We’re watching in real time Republicans rewriting history. The election was rigged. News is fake. The insurrectionists were loving patriots. The pandemic isn’t real. Science is wrong. Masks don’t work. The vaccines are dangerous. Immigrants are evil. Muslims are bad. Rich people are the bulwarks of society. Poor people are lazy. (All 40 million of them.) They (Republicans) are the real victims. Up is down. The sky is not blue.

 And on and on.

            Every day throughout his entire Presidency Trump played the victim card. His entire Presidency. Now he’s playing the ex-President victim card. He will forever be the perpetual victim. That makes his supporters suffering victims as well. They are in an abusive relationship with Trump and they can’t leave their abuser.

They are drawn to him.

$ And resources

            I have watched a couple of videos lately where the hospitalized anti-vaxxers who survived professed that if they had it to do over they still wouldn’t have got the vaccine and still won’t get the vaccine (after all, they survived!). Then there’s also the ‘if it’s my time to die—it’s my time crowd’. ‘It’s all a hoax’ also still has a huge following.

            At some point bean counters will figure up the total cost of the pandemic in dollars. There will be an average cost of hospitalizations due to Covid-19. (I’m just talking money here not the human toll. That’s incalculable.) At this point in the United States we’ve had several hundred thousand die needlessly. The ones dying now are the great unvaccinated.

Death before dishonor!

The Antis

            The antis (maskers and vaxxers) have cost society billions of dollars. It’s too early to tell if it’s tens of billions or hundreds of billions but I lean towards hundreds of billions. It takes a team of nurses, doctors, support staff and high tech equipment to treat Covid-19 patients in hospitals. That takes a lot of $$$$! Their “personal choice” is costing society in real dollars. Whether it’s insurance, the government, hospitals or individuals the costs are real. Ultimately it’s all the rest of us that pay for it.

The costs will be much higher than they needed to be, thanks to the antis.