Before You Put Your Chips On That "Sure Thing"...

h/t daily timewaster

To The Class of 2023

 

We have, on multiple occasions, commended to you the humanitarian works of YouTube engineer Mark Rober, the man who has annually perfected the porch pirate Glitter Bomb, and has entertained literal millions by testing the ingenuity of his backyard tree rats, devising ever better squirrel mazes for them to conquer.

This year, MIT chose him as their commencement speaker, and his speech does not disappoint. Frankly, it's better and more useful than any number of attempts by more serious speakers.

Enjoy.

Make Better Choices

 h/t daily timewaster

Damascus Road

 h/t WRSA

To those for whom this essay is too much obvious truth and common sense to absorb in one sitting, try it in small bites.

If you can handle it, try it in one sitting.

Either way, RTWT.

For those who need to lose some weight, you'll find your journey through life immeasurably better once the scales fall from your eyes, and you drop about ten pounds of b.s. from inside your head. This essay is liposuction.

If the shoe fits...

The Dictator Trap

 

WORD

 

h/t Phil

Go to Phil's blog, Busted Knuckles, Or over to the OP at 90 Miles From Tyranny.

It's a short education in Everything You Need To Know.

For the longer version re-watch this classic of wisdom from 2012:

IANAL. But he is.

Three Books

 

A shamelessly-stolen-from-KDT perennial favorite, and it's been a while since I've seen it trotted out.

At the end of The Time Machine (MGM 1960; we shall brook no reference to the atrocious 2002 remake) inventor H. George Wells returns to the distant future, to attempt to rebuild society from scratch amongst the vacuously braindead Eloi (think of a freshmen history class at Berzerkley). He takes with him only three books.

Your turn. "Which three books would you choose?"

Rules: The Dictionary (any dictionary), any multi-volume encyclopedias, and the Bible are off the table. So are any other multi-volume collections of books. You want a one-volume Complete Works Of Shakespeare, and I'll let it slide. Trying to slip in the Durant's Story Of Civilization will not fly.

Any selection violating those few rules will never appear. Otherwise, it's all fair game in Comments.

Bear well in mind that sooner rather than later, this may very well prove to be far more than merely an academic exercise.

Old Chinese Proverb: For Xhou Bai Den

当一个男人变得太大而不能穿裤子时，在他的坚果上踢一千次会让裤子重新合身

Never argue with a Chinese tailor.

Since You Asked

And note that for brevity, I didn't even talk about getting all geared up,
entering the COVID-pit patient's bubble, doing my thing, and then
peeling out of it to care for any non-Covid patients.
Or worse, living in the hospital equivalent of MOPP Level IV
(military guys know what I'm talking about) for hours upon
hours all day or night. Braying jackasses that think
I have time to deal with bedpans are morons living
in the 1930s, with IQs in the low 40s.
"Hey Maverick, what was the name of that school? Truckmaster??"

Adaptive Curmudgeon at Middle Of the Right blog asks, Do They Really Need ICU?

Fair question, and I assume he's genuinely asking it.*

And thank a merciful deity, what I'm describing below was mostly how it was where I am last February, Not how it is is where I am , now. Yet. At least most nights. But sometimes, it is.

But it may be exactly what's going on in Florida or the Gulf Coast states today, or anywhere where things are getting congested.

What follows, it needs to be said for the small-minded, is not me bragging nor complaining. I knew the job was tough when I took it, I'm damned good at it (after 20 years, I'm starting to get the hang of it) and I sincerely love what I do, just as much as Lebron loves dunking, or a fighter pilot loves sending his opponent down in streamers of flames. (Now see if you can guess, when busybody lackwit 40-IQ governors want to prevent me from doing that job, in order to get injected infected with the poison not-a-vaxx, why I want to give them a few hundred raps to the forehead with a 12-pound sledgehammer, to jar their heads out of their own rectal exhaust pipes. I may or may not be speaking metaphorically.) But what I'm telling you here, and why I'm telling you, is for the benefit of those who have no wild idea, how it simply is. Neither more nor less.

Yes, they really need an ICU bed.

I’ve been a nurse for 25 years, 20 of them in Emergency, and not just “I don’t feel good” Emergency, but the busiest trauma centers and mega-hospitals in not just Califrutopia, but the busiest ERs in the entire civilized world, in the most densely populated region of the United States. Depending on where you ask, between 10-15% of the entire US lives in my county or the bordering ones.
120 hospitals in L.A. and Orange County. Almost as many as there are in the entire states of Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, combined.

What happens to that system which usually runs right on the ragged edge of capacity 24/7/365 in normal times, when you throw a pandemic at them?

In the ICU, they have an intensivist MD right there, most of the time. (The floors seldom have a doctor anywhere, for anything.) The patients are either 1:1, or 1:2, which means the nurse can handle 1 patient, and at most 2, at once. I do 4 in the ER normally.

But If I have ICU patients, and there’s no bed for them there, I can now only do 1 or 2 as well.

I had one last month, who was on 7 different medication drips, which all had to be titrated multiple times per hour to fine tune keeping the patient alive, and in certain parameters of vital signs.

I set my monitors to go off on the dot on the hour, and at :15, :30, and :45.
On the hour, I logged my vital signs. Then began doing the literally 57 things for that one patient I needed to be doing. Including not just doing everything I had to do, but charting that it was done. Picture Han Solo flying the Millenium Falcon through an asteroid field. Blindfolded. By the time I was finished, it was usually :50 minutes past the hour, or more. Meaning I had 2-10 entire minutes to do all the less-than-immediate tasks for that one patient that needed doing. Then it was top of the hour, and start all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For an entire shift.

I wasn’t the only nurse so burdened with ICU patients who couldn’t get to the ICU. Which means if anything happens (like someone’s heart stops) there’s no one free to help anyone else. (A cardiac arrest or a major trauma can suck in 3-6 staff members just from the nursing staff alone, for an hour or more). But with all of us being ad hoc ICU nurses, that ain’t happening.
So a nurse is supposed to bag the patient, do chest compressions, start an IV, pull meds, give them, record all the interventions, all simultaneously and single-handedly? Sh’yeah, when monkeys fly outta my butt. That patient? They came in dead, and they’re going to stay that way. And even if, by some miracle, you get a pulse back, that’s another ICU patient, which you don’t have a bed for, or a nurse for, who’s shortly going to be on 2-7 medication drips, and on a ventilator, leaving the nurse scrambling to keep up the rest of the night…stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Which means my other 3 beds were empty, because there was no one to staff them. That turns a 32-bed ER into an 8 bed ER.

Which closes the hospital to ambulances.
Which sends the ambulances to other hospitals, which closes them.
You understand how one overload takes out a sector of the power grid, which can cascade into taking out an entire region over multiple states, right?
So now, imagine that with sick and injured people.
Except now, a blackout means people die waiting for care they cannot get.
And makes people wait in the waiting room until they’re literally trying very hard to die too, just to get into a bed.
If you’ve just sunk the Titanic or anything like it, and you have lifeboats for 2000 people, but 3500 on the ship, at least 1500 are going to die. But if, each time a lifeboat gets overloaded, all those people swim to the next lifeboat, you swamp each next boat in turn, and everyone dies.
That’s where we were headed when the last COVID wave broke, just about exactly 3 weeks after people all got together for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day get-togethers, and until they started acting like maybe we weren’t fooling about this thing being a problem.

And with my decades of ER experience, I’m a critical care nurse. I don’t like ICU, but I can pull it off, rough around the edges (meaning it isn’t pretty, but I don’t kill anyone or let them die through negligence or inexperience), for a shift or three.

But there were ICU patients on telemetry floors ( a lot less intense than the ED, and two levels of severity below the ICU). And ICU patients on Med/Surg floors (three levels below ICU). Where nurses never titrate a single drip, let alone 7 simultaneously, for an entire shift. And almost never manage ventilator patients in any way. They literally don’t know what they don’t know. Because they’re not supposed to be doing the most critical patients in the entire hospital on the least severe wing of the hospital, with the newest nurses.
Some of those nurses were freshly graduated nurses weeks before COVID kicked into high gear last fall.

And they normally handle 6 or 8 far less serious patients, not 4, 2, or 1.
So now their 40-bed floor ward can handle 5 patients. That means you’ve just wiped 80% of the hospital’s capacity on those floors out, from the get-go.

1,000 beds is now 200 beds.
200 beds is now 40 beds.
And it’s put the most seriously ill, critical patients, into the hands of the least-experienced nurses in the hospital.

Imagine throwing 5 year-olds into the 40-foot waves on Oahu’s North Shore with a pool noodle, and you’re not too far off.

Now see if you can figure out why some of those 600,000 people died from COVID in the last 18 months or so.

The nurses who regularly care for the sickest ICU patients are freaking rock stars, and they can only handle at most, 2 at once.

In the last serious COVID wave, from about Labor Day to the end of last February, half the nurses who worked in our ICU said “F**k it, I’m out!“. Forever. Burned out by 1 or 2 mega-critical patients like I had, every shift, every day, for weeks and weeks on end, understaffed, under-equipped, and under-supplied with basic equipment and supplies. No lunches, no breaks, just a 12-hour endless slog from 7 to 7, every day or night, and the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, ad infinitum.
The ER and other floors lost upwards of 1/3 of our staff, for the same reasons.
Replacements can’t be whistled up, and they can’t be trained in less than years, to a minimum level of competence.

So hell yes, people die because we’re out of beds, out of supplies for the patients, out of PPE for the staff, and out of the staff to even show up.

In simple terms: how many games are the Dodgers or Yankees going to win in a season if they can only put 6 or 4 players on the field?

And what you’re asking, I assume legitimately, is “But do they really need 9 guys on the field? Do they really have to be major league players? Can’t the kids from Little League, high school, or maybe even Single-A suck it up and pull the load instead?”

So, my sincere question back to you is, what do you think the answer to that question is? 

{And I didn't send this to my reply at that site, but I forgot to mention: In the ER, as in the ICU, I have a critical care monitor over nearly every patient bed in the department, so I (and others) can see my patient's heart beat, oxygen level,  blood pressure, and respirations instantly, in real time. The telemetry floors are only monitored at the main nursing station, NOT the bed side. The Med/Surg floors have no monitoring anywhere, just portable vital signs machines, usually 2-4 for 40 beds. That's flying a plane at night, without any instruments installed, in the mountains. With a student pilot. You guess where the pitfalls in that approach are, and how well it's going to work, and for how long.}

*But I was wrong: he was just being a jackass, and virtue-signalling his Dunning-Kruger credentials.

Here's his reply to the above at his site:

Aesop: I let this get posted so others would understand why I hold you in such contempt.

You told us all how important you were, and how much smarter and better trained than everyone else but you really didn’t say all that much.
Nor did you really answer my question.
But hey, you got to blow your own horn again, so I guess you made yourself feel special.

Please, next time you comment, let it be either in answer to the post, a useful comment to the post, but please not so self serving, MMKAY?

No, I told you about 40 different ways that the patients who need ICU are sick as hell, and need the specialized care that only the ICU, and nurses trained to operate there regularly, can provide, which AIN'T ME, and that this is already kicking THEIR asses. But Reality doesn't comport with your ignorance or prejudices, so you honked your own horn and blew all that information right out your ass. Which was why I didn't wait for your gracious permission, and posted it myself.

Your disingenuousness is noted.

Don't waste time asking rhetorical questions you're manifestly too stupid to process when you get the answers. And good luck with that plan for the rest of your life. Like with undertakers, and for the same reason, that sort of intelligence is why I've been fully employed for 25 years, and people like you are my best customers.

Sorry to disturb your navel-gazing with the answers you couldn't handle. Go back to your beer and chemtrail websites. And by all means, don't wear a mask, lick the handrails, and pee on the electric fence. What could go wrong with that life plan?

Thanks again for reminding me why dealing with you honestly and giving you the benefit of any doubt is a complete waste of time, except as an object lesson to others.

Not having learned his lesson, and after getting picked on in Comments, he now doubles down, and takes another swing:

Bon 08/17/2021 at 17:04 said:

So far, Aesop’s record is slightly poorer than Fauci and the CDC. Remember the Ebola thing? And many other of his predictions?

I mean, he makes a TV weatherman look like a prophet…

You mean, when Fauci and the head of the CDC both said Ebola would never get here, and I said it would?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC said we had protocols that would deal with it, and I said we didn’t?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC said our first world medicine would triumph and stop it cold, and I said it wouldn’t?

When Fauci and the head of the CDC told you any hospital could handle Ebola, and I said that only the four BL-IV hospitals were trained or equipped to handle it?

You mean when, after they were both 100% wrong, and I was 100% right, on every one of those predictions, and Ebola in a Dallas ICU, using the CDC’s protocols, multiplied at the exact same rate it does in the wild, with no precautions, they ended up moving every Ebola patient in America – including the two ICU nurses they managed to infect with it in exactly 21 days, just like it multiples in the wild – into those exact BL-IV beds, taking up all but one of the only 11 such beds in North America, leaving us a red hair away from becoming West Africa?

Yeah, I remember that pretty well, since you mention it.

Everything I posted then (summer to winter 2014) is still up on my blog, in case you care to check it.

Now, tell me about your local weatherman with a 100% accuracy rate on his predictions and prophecies.

I haven’t made many predictions, as such. But the ones I have have panned out pure gold.

Please, B, for the love of God, stop stomping on your own junk with sharp cleats on. 

Timeless Wisdom From Guido

 

"In a sluggish economy, never, ever fuck with another man's livelihood."

"Now, if you're smart, like I hope you are, 

you're not gonna make me come back here..."

Word.

If you've never seen Risky Business, I highly recommend it.

And while Tom Cruise's Joel is the Hero in this tale, it's important to note that in the end, he lost everything he thought he'd gained to the Villain, Guido the Killer Pimp, played masterfully to a junkyard dog "t" by Joe Pantoliano. Joel was lucky to walk away with almost the status quo ante, sadder but oh so wiser.

Guido's words, above, and that ultimate lesson, thunders down through the ages from unlikely font of wisdom, then-rookie director/writer Paul Brickman.

That wisdom should never, ever be lightly disregarded.

For all kinds of reasons.

Sage Advice

 h/t Peter

 

"Play stupid games: win stupid prizes."

Ignore this reality at your own peril.

The easiest way to "Get off the 'X'" is not to walk over and stand on it in the first place.

What happens when BLM/Antifa finds out that their ambush has become the "X" in someone else's ambush is the point where hilarity ensues.

Risky Business

Timeless wisdom for the ages, from Guido the Killer Pimp:

 

"In a sluggish economy, never, EVER f**k with another man's livelihood."

D'Accord

Herschel nails it.

"Listen.  The second amendment sanctuary movement is a God-send.  This provides structure.  This provides the ability to turn national politics into local politics. 

Bloomberg wanted to go local.  Very well.  He’s won some of the battles.  But by going local and getting everyone on board with the 2A resolutions, that affects not only local, but national politics and policy as well. 

Do you understand?  This is your chance to become involved in local politics and have a national effect. 

That’s why the communists are scared of the movement.  They should be.  It’s grass roots.  It’s organic.  It’s local.  Most of all, it’s righteous."

 RTWT.

I've disagreed with Herschel before. I can disagree with anyone. I've seen me do it.
But he parked that one out over the bleachers.
Truth bomb. Delivered on target.

Take it to heart.

Tyrants absolutely panic over the Liberty corona virus. Because they know once it becomes epidemic, there's no stopping it.

And they know what happens to them afterwards.

Two Paths

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

John Wilder (yes, THE John Wilder) has a great post today on adversity and perseverance.
As usual, RTWT.
We'll be here when you're done.

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense."  

– Winston Churchill

Yeah, and Sylvester Stallone was on his second trip around the studios, who had all rejected his script for Rocky multiple times, and so broke he was about to be evicted from his crappy one-bedroom apartment, before he finally found someone who’d make the movie and let him play the lead.
Which only turned out to be the Best Picture of 1976.

But, natzsofast, Guido.

The illustrations we chose can make a big difference in the story we tell.
So let's give equal time to an opposing view.

Let us also remember another guy’s story of failure.

Bob was an executive, not a failure, per se. But he hadn’t really made his mark and hit the top tier.
So he spearheaded the drive to create a revolutionary new car, for one of the top auto makers in the world.
Anyone who knows cars knows it as the Edsel.
Yes, Bob was truly one of the best and brightest.

So best and bright that JFK made him Secretary of Defense, and then his failures kicked into high gear.
He thought a war in South Vietnam was not just necessary, but winnable.
He thought the F-111 would make a great airplane, for both the Air Farce and the Navy.
He made the Army buy the M-16.
And he thought drafting literal retards would be great for battlefield success.
Anyone reading this can google how those brilliant stunts turned out.

After such a lifetime of failure, you’d have thought Bob would have retired 0-for-Ever, but he was just hitting his stride.

Bob moved on to the World Bank, and came up with the genius idea to lend billions to Turd World countries like Mexico, and dozens of others, knowing they had no way to repay it, ever.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are thus three morals to this story:

1) Don’t be Bob.
2) Sometimes, your first failure is nature’s way of telling you to go home, stick a gun in your mouth, and do humanity a favor, by taking one for the team.
3) Know which thing Failure is telling you.

Because sometimes failure, like with Edison, is just teaching you 999 ways not to make a light bulb.
Other times, like with Bob, failure is telling you that your greatest service to humanity would be as a soil supplement.

Laconic

That right there.
Just that.
Period.

Generations Of War, And Where We Are

You want a master's thesis précis on warfare from ever to right now, but written to understand at the middle-school level?
Here's your guy:

Von Clausewitz talked about war being waged on three levels:

• Physical – Breaking stuff and killing people and taking land.
• Mental – Making the enemy think what you want them to think. Confusing them.
• Moral – You have to believe that what you’re fighting for is right, just and correct.

Oh, and the "right now" part of that equation?
Glad you asked:

 In order to win this war:

• The aliens must be gently, firmly, and quickly be sent home.
• We must stop supporting them with cash if they are here.
• We must make life here so unhelpful that they voluntarily deport themselves.
• We must not give their nations cash if they keep coming here.
• We must stop cash flowing from individuals to their home country.
• We can help their home countries to build industries and meaningful jobs.
• If the people like, heck, we could come in and run the country for them since they seem to suck at running countries and we seem to be good at it. Is illegal immigration really the best argument for colonization ever?
• We must win at the mental and moral levels.

We are in a war.  Are we ready to fight?  Because I don’t think that the 5^th Generation of war will be quite as nice as the 4^th . . . .

Read the whole thing, certainly.
Better yet, bookmark his site.
Then take a day and work your way back as far as you can go.

Somebody who can think well, write clearly, and gets it right. On everything under the sun.
If his site isn't on your daily reads, fix that. Today.
And if P.J. O'Rourke dies, relax.
We've found his replacement.

Focus

h/t Daily Timewaster

Dane-Geld

Dane-Geld

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
  To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
  Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
  And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
  And then  you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
  To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
  We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've  proved it again and  again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
  For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
  You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
  No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
  And the nation that pays it is lost!"

For Common Core grads, here's the modern version:

Hint: It has pictures. When next you come up out of her basement, have mommy read it to you.

On Craft

OldNFO shares his travails doing the tedious research for an upcoming book project (and then, as is his wont, generously shares an excerpt).

In his missive, he shares that he's "not trying to be Louis L'Amour here".

Au contraire, mon ami.
That's exactly who you're trying to be.

The reason L'Amour was L'Amour was his auto-didact doctoral-level encyclopedic research, especially primary sources, and wide-ranging knowledge of his subject matter, and a not inconsiderable amount of life experience living it out beforehand.

{cf.: Thoreau, W.H. Dana, Melville, ad infinitum}

In the writing world, there are the L'Amours, in whatever genre, and there are the hacks.
Anyone can get rich being a hack if they compensate with other skills, mainly because the pool of dim lights buying their b.s. has grown by leaps and bounds.

But the 'net has cut pretty deeply into the ability of hacks to pretend expertise, leading to an epidemic of butthurt, and no shortage of hacks entering ancillary employment.
(Which explains Hollywood, for example, since pretty much forever.)

Research for a novel is like planning for an invasion.

No craftsman worthy of the title ever skips sharpening his tools or oiling the machinery because it's "tedious" or "annoying", any more than any pilot who wants to become an old pilot skips pre-flighting his aircraft.
That's why it's called craft.

Good on anyone for doing that work.

But...WHY?

I got PM'ed by a friend about the recent blog-fodder.

"What are you trying to do? Jump-start a revolution? Run a battalion? Create your own team of death ninjas? I just don't get it, or see the ultimate point..."

In order:
A) Not as such. I think we'll get one regardless of what I do, eventually.
B) Be still my beating heart. Actually, I want a full corps, as in a few divisions. Starting with a fire team, and then a squad, and building upwards into bigger pieces. But I digress.
C) Not hardly.

D) The greater question, the ultimate point, is rather simple.

Things are sliding. We may fight cultural holding actions. We may garner a respite, as we have done now until 2020, maybe until 2024. Or until one presidential heart attack, mind you. We may even, at some places and times, push the tide back.
(Cf.: the Netherlands, from 1600-present. It can be done. That's a post for another day.)

But for all intents, civilization in general, and Western civilization in particular, has been oozing towards a tipping point for 50 years, and probably closer to a full century.

Every step forward is counter-balanced by two steps back, in every single case.

What any earnest and thoughtful person is, and should be, doing, is bracing for impact.

"Oh Aesop, you're being Chicken Little. Everything's not falling apart..."

The combined debt of the world is more than some recockulous multiple of what the whole thing is worth, in annual terms, and has been for years.

If you're in America, the dollar in your hand is worth $0.03, in actual constant-dollar terms. In other words, less than the cost to purchase the materials and print it. "Weimar and Zimbabwe called, and asked if you'd like to get together for lunch sometime..."

In short, the global economy is, and has been for some time, Wile E. Coyote after he goes off the edge of the cliff, but before he looks down. We are, in effect, just waiting for society to look down. Then the long, whistling descent before the puff of dust at impact.

The pinnacle of modern technology, daily multitudinous miracles in which we live and breathe and have our being in, for those of us not living in mud-hut Third World sh*tholes, hangs on distribution and supply strands of money, materials, energy, food, water, communication, and everything else, which are as fragile as molecular-sized strands of glass. One disruption, let alone a systemic shock, and the whole house of cards goes away like frost on the lawn on a hot day. For years, decades, maybe centuries. Maybe forever. At any rate, probably until long after your travails on this spinning sphere have reached a dirt-nap ending.

And if, and far more likely, when, any or all of that happens, people revert from apes to lizards on the evolutionary scale. It will become society against nation, nation against region, region against town, town against tribe, tribe against family, and family against self, at a speed that would astonish Charles Darwin. But not so much astonishment for C.S. Lewis, John Calvin, or William Hobbes.

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

That's your life in a State of Nature, when the veneer of civilization is rubbed off of human existence. For some people in some places, it's every day right now. Don't expect a lot of sympathy from them when you soft-hands lot have to suddenly join them in that plight. They'll be sizing you up for the stew pot, like as not, come that day.

And at that point, the survival of you yourself, your family, your tribe, and if you're very lucky, your town, against the hordes of savages dying but not yet dead from terminal lack of foresight or forethought, let alone preparedness, will depend on what you bring to the table.

You do PT, because strong, healthy, fit  people can do more work, live better, last longer, run faster, and they're generally much harder to kill.

You learn First Aid because things go wrong; this world will kill you with all the concern and compassion the magnifying glass has for the ant, as it focuses the sun's rays to produce a momentary micro-wisp of steam. Go watch the stop-action of Mt. St. Helens erupting, or any one of dozens of YouTube videos of the Fukushima tsunami, just for a refresher of how much Nature loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
This primal reality is exactly what Steven Spielberg tapped into in the masterful first five minutes of Jaws. Nature is The Shark, and you're Chrissie, butt-naked, clueless, and about to get the last ride of your life, right to the death knell of that floating buoy, in agony, cold, scared, and finally knowing that everything is about to end for ever, and for real.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...

And that's been true since we left the Garden/climbed out of the trees, and deep down in your brain, at the lizard level, you know this. And if you forget it at the wrong moment, you end up in a footbath-sized pan of Tupperware, far beyond the point when you can protest that "This is no boating accident!" What this is, is Life. And Life includes Death.
So you learn ways to put yours off as long as possible.

You learn how to shoot and handle weapons, because you don't have great size, speed, claws, fangs, endogenous venom, a tough hide, monstrously thick bones, or a dinosauric shell, carapace, or scales. But with a good weapon, and diligent application, you can take down things that do. And more importantly, deny and dissuade hordes of your fellow soft-shelled Slow Pork comrades, bent on putting your hide on their barn door, and your Stuff in their pockets. Like they will, for every reason from primal survival to jealousy and envy, going back only as far as Cain.

You learn fieldcraft, because teams defeat individuals, going back to apes wielding bones at the Monolith, and there are right ways and wrong ways to do things once you slip the bounds of polite society.

You learn individual survival skills because you might be caught out, cut off, or left alone, and you want to live to rejoin your team or tribe, and be able to fight another day, get back to your family, and continue to propagate the species, because it's programmed into your very DNA, in ways you haven't ever really considered.

That's why we cover this stuff.

If anyone still can't grasp that, or agree to it, by all means: eat, drink and be merry.
Don't worry about anything, nor everything.
It'll be fine.
Trust me.

And when disaster or calamity or an angry mob happens, and you've wasted not a single thought or effort in your entire selfish and thoughtless life to avoiding that eventuality, hug your teddy, cry for mama, and resolve to taste very bad.

Or cut to the chase, and just kill yourselves.

"In case of the bright flash of a nearby nuclear detonation, wrap yourself in a clean white shroud, and walk slowly towards the cemetery."
"Why 'walk', Comrade?"
"So as not to create a panic." - Soviet Union civil defense joke

As I told you at the outset: