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| Cluebat For Retards: Mayor Vaughn is not the secret hero of this film. Apologies if that was news to anyone. |
Theatre is life.
Film is art.
Television is furniture.
- (Entertainment industry truism.)
Art imitates life. And vice versa.
Let art inform your real life.
Hint: When the guy on the front lines and the smartest guy in the room have sussed out the full nature of the problem, and the danger it represents, don't be the guy digging in his heels, and yelling the loudest to re-open the beaches on the 4th Of July.
You're just ringing the goddam dinner bell, fer chrissakes.
And it never works out well.
For anyone.
This would all be hilariously funny, and terribly ironic, if it wasn't real life, with actual dead people stacked up like cordwood in freezer trucks outside NYFC hospitals, knowing that a 20-something-year-old nobody named Stevie Spielberg had this figured out in the late summer/early fall of '74.
And a little point about the guy who told you the truth, before you listened to the yappy ignorant assholes, and the cheapskates worried about being on welfare the whole winter:
Yeah, he dies in the end, saving cheap bastards who couldn't care less, but you decide: would you rather be the Tragic Hero, going out swinging till the very end, or be the archtypical Asshole Of the World until the day you die, knowing every waking moment that your pigheaded stupidity and petty greed killed your friends and neighbors, who foolishly misplaced their trust in you?
I've made my choice, and I can sleep like a baby at night.
15 comments:
How do you put the entire country on welfare for 6 months?
How do you rebuild the crumbling remains of the country after you bankrupt three quarters of the businesses and the tens of millions of families they support?
How many millions of families are you willing to destroy, to maybe save a few thousand (mostly) elderly lives? How many suicides are enough to sacrifice at the alter of hubris?
How many millions of people does someone have to be willing to shovel into crematoriums before we can fairly tar them as genocidal?
Show all work.
The "entire country" isn't on welfare now.
The longest anyone has been out is a month, at this point.
Only five year olds think today is forever.
But if anyone wants to simply get it over with, and just start shoveling people they don't consider important into the furnaces, they should come out and acknowledge it openly.
Be on notice: showing all work includes explaining who decides who lives, and who dies. And why they get that privilege.
Should the people who were least prepared for bad times be the deciders on how long is too long?
Isn't that like letting Gilligan drive the boat, or Rainman driving the car?
Or should we poll only the people who weren't that short-sighted?
You don't. You drag the remnants and trash into a pile and burn it.
Then you rebuild with a plan and a purpose. Applying the lessons learned to the new design.
Very rarely do they salvage part of a house that burned down. They use a backhoe and a few bigass dumpsters to clear the site and after its cleaned you rebuild. Sometimes they save the foundation but more often than not they replace the slab too.
The powers that be are truly not letting this crisis go to waste. They will let school out early for reinfection, and continue with stimulus. What was in the 2.2 trillion dollar spending list do you know? Stimulus 2.0 was on the table before 1.0 was distributed. The virus will end when stupid stops but stupid won't do anything about government. Why more stimulus, give us our money back. Next up 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 then the ballot box then the cartridge box to fix stupid.
The way to get lower risk people back to work is an effective treatment. As Aesop has so clearly stated over and over, the real problem with Covid is the hospitalization rate. If that can be slashed with the Plaquenil combo, ivermectin, Tamiflu or whatever, then Covid, at least, will no longer be the issue. The work on a treatment seems to be progressing rapidly, so I'm taking what I see as good advice--use my extra time to clean and organize, harden the domicile, plant a garden, and learn skills both practical and marketable.
Michigan has been on lockdown since March 24, just two weeks. We are third for deaths in the nation. Of course, if you subtracted the idiots in the shitty, who aren't aren't following social distancing and are getting infected and dying en masse, we'd be doing pretty well. Naturally, the claim of "structural racism" is being used to explain the "disparity" of infections/deaths in POC's. Now, they're planning to transfer "recovering Covid patients" to "facilities" in my county, where we've had only the same two deaths for weeks. Oh goodie.
I'm sorry, I meant the way to get everyone back to work is an effective treatment, and looks to be in the works, so enough chatter. I'm going to the barn. Beautiful day here.
Aesop, again THANK YOU for this blog. Snug in my THOW, blissfully happy with no TV and mostly using the internet to see if the weather was good for hawking, I had kinda checked out on what was happening in the world. Only the fact that I enjoy your writing so much alerted me to not only update my neglected preps but get the extended family MOVING. Because of you, me and mine are in a much better position to survive this mess.
And I'm VERY HAPPY to know your hospital is not in the shit, at least yet.
I also appreciate your posts here. No words to adequately express except thank you for your work here and there on frontlines. Read an interesting story about a fellow nurse and her efforts to save her parents, hospitalized both with covid 19, dad placed on vent. Just an example of a nurse doing what a nurse has gotta do, especially when it's your own.
https://alvareviewcourier.com/story/2020/04/05/local/in-face-of-unknown-daughter-pushed-to-influence-treatment-for-her-parents/61925.html?m=true
@Hawkin'Gal
In the event that you ever come back to this message thread again... Re: Michigan Detroit area COVID-19 numbers.
I went to and graduated from a 90% black high school in the 70's. Had our 40th reunion so a number of them are Facebook friends.
Lots of Blacks getting it in Detroit in Michigan. My guess from what I know about them and their way of life is they tend to be unhealthy and that they don't do the social distancing thing as much as white people.
Different cultures:
Fried chicken, fried fish, lots of starch, lots of fat and grease and big meals, big family get-togethers, lots of social interaction whether just hanging out or going to church, etc. Lots of overweight and heavy cigarette smoking.
Different attitudes:
A willfull ignorance of the risk factors and the steps necessary to mitigate them. Quoting an example: "I'm not going to live my life in fear" - 2 Timothy 1:7 "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind."
God Bless Black people - most of them that are the decent sort anyway. However I find them to be mostly long on superstition and short on science and understanding how things really work in the physical world.
A lot of them also seem to be a bit slow to catch on to some things, if you catch my drift (but you didn't hear that from me, cause that would be racist).
Oh yeah, most of them were retired from jobs working civil service for the city, county, state, or federal government - social services, schools, housing, etc. I'm still working in a technical hands on auto industry related job.
Different cultures, different ways of thinking and looking at life.
@Wendy
I taught high school math in two Detroit public high schools, one east side, one west, for twenty years. Quit two years ago. During my tenure, the population in the city changed dramatically. While over my twenty years, ALL my students and parents were Black, the professionals, semi-professionals, skilled trades, etc., left for the suburbs or went out of state by around 2012. What remained, my black colleagues referred to as "ghetto." To your list of adverse behaviors add rampant drug use, gang activity, and often very poor hygiene. It's likely to burn in Detroit for quite a while.
@Hawkin'Gal
Thanks for the explanation and the update of how Detroit has changed in the last twenty years.
I grew up around the time Detroit really changed from majority white to majority black (in the 70's).
Didn't occur to me that the city underwent a further change from majority black middle class to majority lower class black.
Well, I guess that explains why all my black classmates who didn't move out of state live in Southfield.
Now that everyone is older, they are all nice God-fearing people for the most part, but in my opinion they still blame way too many things on slavery and racism and are hopeless Democrat voters.
Glad that you're now out of there and in a much better and safer place.
Completely agree with Aesop. Would like to add that we should be testing for antibodies to determine who has already had this virus. That would allow those people to work, shop for groceries for their neighbors and extended family, and maybe donate plasma with antibodies that could help those with a worsening case of COVID-19. It's very suspicious that there is no interest in antibody testing that could make this pandemic much less taxing on our country.
The tricky part would be to have the antibody testing without the federal government using the test as an excuse to put together that big citizen DNA database they've always wanted, and without issuing armbands and travel documents like Nazi Germany.
For the record... the USA was F'd in the A by the CDC. They sat on their hands for two months and did nothing. Chinese scientists published the virus genome on January 12th. German scientists had an RT-PCR test a week later. The CDC eventually sent out 9,000 of the million test kits they were promised to send, and those had contaminated negative controls and had to be returned. I try to avoid mistaking government ineptitude for evil intent, but this much bureaucratic bungling strains credulity. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. You had ONE JOB.
It's very suspicious that there is no interest in antibody testing that could make this pandemic much less taxing on our country.
It's very boring that you are unaware of the multiple antibody tests that are being performed right now, seeing as how I've reported 6 in comments to this blog, 4-5 of which are already in progress. The CDC is planning 3, has started 1-2, their 3rd does not have a definite start date. There are at least 3 independent of the CDC so far, including one by the NIH which the CDC will join in later phases.
For the record... the USA was F'd in the A by the CDC. They sat on their hands for two months and did nothing. Chinese scientists published the virus genome on January 12th. German scientists had an RT-PCR test a week later. The CDC eventually sent out 9,000 of the million test kits they were promised to send, and those had contaminated negative controls and had to be returned. I try to avoid mistaking government ineptitude for evil intent, but this much bureaucratic bungling strains credulity. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. You had ONE JOB.
It's very definitely not the case the CDC had "ONE JOB." All concerned, from the US public health community for whom infectious disease control became unfashionable, to our ruling class which directed it to fight "Big Gulps and guns", share blame in this.
Your chronology and blame for the testing debacle is fantastically false, everyone outside the PRC started working on tests on the same day, Thailand lab confirmed the first ex-PRC case 0-1 days later (helps that a royal princess is a biochemist), the day a lab in Shanghai for the good of humanity published a genome sequence for SARS-CoV-2, and on the following day got permanently shut down by the CCP for "rectification."
The German scientists as I recall published their testing protocol in a couple of days, and it's official that in another couple of days the WHO anointed it as their standard test. Somewhere in this period a company in Germany started cranking them out 24x7.
"They sat on their hands for two months and did nothing." is a blatant lie. The CDC failed to develop a robust test, and catastrophically failed to manufacture it for other labs, but were running tests immediately, By January 31st they were the first to disclose RT-PCR tests were flaky in the real world, which was soon echoed by other countries, and they indeed sandbagged the rest of the US for over a month.
The better focus might be on the FDA, which prevented any other organization besides the New York public health department from doing testing, the latter merely duplicating the CDC's test, and only getting their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) under the old system the same day the FDA was forced to throw open the gates.
FDA roadblocks were so severe they demanded tests be able to distinguish between SARS-CoV which died out, MERS-Cov, which isn't spreading much, let alone in the US, and SARS-CoV-2. That sounds to me like a deliberate policy to limit testing, and I think we're allowed to suspect evil intent.
The CDC's testing failures sound more like the usual stuff we expect from a government bureaucracy that had become so incompetent in infectious diseases, which we learned about in 2014, between their response to the African Ebola epidemic, and for example their exposing 80 of their people to anthrax bacteria.
@Wendy
Thank you and you're right that I'm now much safer. I loved teaching, but it was becoming scary. Kept getting pressure from downtown that too many kids getting suspended, even after the fatal shooting in our parking lot, even after two of my students--in my third and fifth hour classes, respectively, were arrested and sentenced for the Steven Utash beating.
https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2014/06/i_let_my_anger_take_over_steve.html
Have many friends among my colleagues, black and white. Almost all are Democrats, but they all live in the suburbs, many in majority-white, Republican-run suburbs. Funny how that works.
@Hawkin'Gal and Wendy:
You two should take a look at this Nigerian Christian woman L.E. Ikenga who teaches part-time in NY. She's written several articles on American Thinker. I didn't read them all but a couple. You come away thinking that she thinks her kind (Blacks) are irredeemable in their ideas and behavior. She also was appalled when Obama was reelected. Worth-reading as hers is a quite rare opinion ! Here's an excerpt about Western Civ: ... And although, I know that a classical Christian education is a big part of the answer to all of this, I’m no longer sure that the black community, at large, is even worth it......https://www.americanthinker.com/author/le_ikenga/
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