Thank you all for your warm words in response to my brooding post. As I struggle to understand the mindset of parents harassing teachers and healthcare professionals who are trying to protect their children’s lives, I thought to look back at what came to be called the black plague, which is to say the bubonic plague. According to Wikipedia, over a period of 10 or 15 years in the 14th century, it killed between a third and a half of the entire population of Europe!
By way of contrast, Covid has killed roughly 2/10 of 1% of
the American population, and much of that death has been in nursing homes and
other segregated places. Even when the pandemic is described as “raging” among
the unvaccinated, the percentage of people actually dying or getting seriously
ill is tiny. Perhaps that helps to
explain why people allow themselves to embrace myths, hoaxes, and fantasies
even in communities hard-hit by the virus.
Nevertheless, I cannot imagine being the parent of a young child and
protesting violently against people trying to protect my child’s life and
health. There is a sickness abroad in this land not carried by a coronavirus
and it threatens to kill what remains of American democracy.
I cannot tell whether Biden simply cannot grasp the
seriousness of the problem, or alternatively understands it quite well enough
and thinks that his only chance of defending the country is to pass massive
spending bills that so directly and positively affect so many people that
Democratic candidates can hold their seats in 2022 and again in 2024.
On another matter overwhelming my sangfroid, namely global
warming and climate change, although there has been an enormous amount of
attention paid to this subject recently, relatively little of it has focused on
the disrptions that will be produced by climate change in such things as the size,
location, and fertility of agricultural lands and the concomitant large-scale
migrations that such changes will necessitate. Harking back to my comments some
weeks ago about fertility rates and their implications for population growth or
decline, by the middle of the current century – well after I have gone – the
world is going to see population movements that will create huge and quite
possibly unmanageable conflicts between so-called “First World” populations,
which are declining in number, and so-called “Third World” populations, which
are soaring in numbers. This will be a good deal more serious than simply the
inevitable loss of beachfront properties in Florida or North and South
Carolina.
10 comments:
Your beloved Tigger now arouses the ire of "Karens."
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/att/cm/white-woman-confronted-her-black-233629692.html
Only in America.
The world is everything that is the case and that includes unpalatable characters who are either stupid or evil or both. There is no law of history that America is not doomed or in decline or will not end in disaster.
There is a fight on and who knows how it will end?
I don't think Biden is a philosopher or philosopher king but he might have a better read on what is possible and what will pay off and both your desperation and Biden's coolness are gambles.
The world is everything that is the case but maybe the world is what we make of it, to a degree, too
I believe the bubonic plague started after several thousand idiots decided to kill all the cats in central Europe. They thought those cats were related to the activities of witches. The result was that the rat population exploded and the fleas and ticks on the rodents, who had the plague, transferred it to the people living there. As an analogy, the cats are like the health care workers telling us to all get vaccinated. Stop or shut up the activities of the cats and the plague gets worse...
Some may say the death of cats had nothing to do with the 2nd pandemic of the bubonic plague in Europe. But do we really know this as a fact? Cats don't just eat rats that are infected. They also kill and eat young rats and unborn rats that may spread the disease if they get older...
I have no fondness for rats, and feel no particular imperative to come to their defense against defamatory allegations, but recent historical and scientific analyses indicate that it was not the fleas on rats that caused the plague, but the fleas and lice on humans, which did come from the rats, which caused the plague.
See: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42690577
and
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/rats-plague-black-death-humans-lice-health-science
Errata:
Should read "did not come from the rats ... "
I started calling the Republican Party the "party of mortality and morbidity" back when they first opposed and then ran on repealing the Affordable Care Act. (The mortality and morbidity phrase came from a CDC weekly publication called the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report which is a very interesting read)
We now face the reality, and the horrible consequences, of state officials consciously pursuing policies that will kill their constituents. This morning I read an article titled "Increasing COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in Florida and Texas Could Have Saved 4,7000 Lives through July" (Commonwealth Fund blog).
There do seem to be pockets of rebellion in the hard hit Southern states which suggests that parents, some at least, have understood the crisis demands vaccination and mask policies. I think Trump’s pandemic response was a major factor in his defeat. The responses of Republican governors to the pandemic and the costs imposed by such decisions are going to weigh heavily on citizens and figure prominently in campaigns.
There is no way to predict what the mortality rate will be when all is said and done. Huge portions of the planet have not been vaccinated. The longer the virus circulates among large populations the more likely many more variants will arise, and one of these may be the one that raises mortality rates. This, of course, is exactly what happened to the “Spanish Flu”. The original covid virus had an RO of 2-3, but the Delta variant has an estimated RO of 6-9 (RO is the N of people who contract a disease from one carrier.)
In NC we have university administrators who are both smart enough and well-informed enough to know (and, in fact, do believe) that mandatory vaccination would be a good idea. But they are too craven to push for it. So craven that they distort vaccination numbers and advertise measures that they have, in fact, not taken. It's going to be a real shitshow across the UNC system (hence in the nearby communities). Faculty and staff with children and/or immune compromised family are, or should be, scared shitless.
Good. Let them follow the path of insanity.
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