This and other greatness available here: http://www.lastkisscomics.com/comic/may-the-fourth-be-with-you/My husband is the punster in the family. And his Good Twin (yes, he is the Evil Twin) is also a punster. And one of the things that I and the wife of my husband’s Good Twin frequently bond over is rolling our eyes at the horrible puns our husbands come up with.
So here we are (at least on this side of the International Date Line) at the fourth day of the month of May, where one of the things that tends to happen on the internet are various references to Star Wars, because of the pun, “May the Fourth Be With You.” So, happy Star Wars Day to those of you who observe it.
The fourth of May has other significance for other people. And we would be remiss not to acknowledge these important events that ought to be commemorated on this day. So:
On May 4, 1436 Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson was assassinated. Englebrektsson was a Swedish nobleman who led a rebellion against the King of the Kalmar Union, an event which eventually led to Sweden becoming a kingdom of its own. Englebrektsson is considered a national hero of Sweden because his actions gave peasants a voice in government for the first time, creating a Riksdag (a deliberative assembly or parliament) structured so that peasants and laborers would have equal representation with the number of nobles.
On May 4, 1886, in the midst of a long-running strike, police marched on demonstrators in Hay Market Square in Chicago, Illinois. Someone threw a bomb. The police began shooting randomly. And I really mean randomly, because autopsies determined afterward that almost all seven of the policeman killed in the riot were the victims of a bullet from another officer. Four of the labor demonstrators also died from gunshot wounds, and more than a hundred other people were wounded by either gunfire or shrapnel from the bomb. While May Day parades and demonstrations by labor had been occurring for a few years before this occurred, this event is often credited as solidifying the significance of May Day as a Worker’s Rights commemoration.
On May 4, 1930, the leader of India’s civil disobedience campaign, Mahatma Gandhi, was taken into custody by the British police for the crime of making salt from seawater. His arrest sparked an upsurge in civil disobedience, generating world wide publicity and incredible pressure on the British to come to terms with the protestors.
On May 4, 1970, during a protest at Kent State University against the bombing of neutral Cambodia by U.S. military forces, the Ohio National Guard fired on unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine others. In response to this, students at other universities went on strike, shutting down many campuses. The event also was significant in turning more public opinion against the war in Viet Nam.
On May 4, 1983 the British warship, HMS Sheffield, was struck by missiles during the Falklands War. The excess rocket fuel in each missile ignited, killing 20 members of the crew. The ship’s diesel stores burned for days after the crew had been evacuated. The ship sank while it was being towed in for repairs.
Important historical events, all.
But while two of those occurred within my lifetime, one must remember that I am a white-bearded old man. The median age of the human race is currently 29 years old. Which means that half of the people currently alive on the planet were born in 1991 or more recently.
Which means that none of those events can be considered “current.”
Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be remembered, but there isn’t really a good reason that any of those events should be considered more important in history than the others.
Which also means that there is nothing wrong with people sharing a silly pun on this same day.
Regardless, we’re in the middle of a world pandemic. The more people you get wearing masks (and feeling socially shunned for not wearing masks), the more we reduce the spread of the disease. That’s just science. It’s also the moral thing to do.
So, wear a mask. Wash your hands. Keep observing social distancing. Let’s all do our part to keep as many of us alive until there’s a vaccine as we can. Okay?
Except I’m too grumpy to remember to say please.I was going to have a new entry in my why I love sf/f series today, but I needed to have time and energy to finish it Wednesday night, and that didn’t happen. I felt rotten all day Wednesday. I don’t want to get into all the symptoms, but not all of them are the sorts most people would associate with hay fever, and while some of them might happen if one has contracted the novel coronavirus…. and many weren’t. I didn’t have what any medical person (except my GP of more than 2 decades) would consider a fever—normally my body temperature ranges from 94-point-something to about 97-point-something if I’m not sick. My temperature very rarely goes above 98 unless I’m sick.
So for the last few days I had some weird symptoms, and yesterday they intensified and my temperature kept running above 98. And, as I said, I just felt bad overall. Very early after waking up I got some very stressful (and irritating) news at work, and the work day just kept getting more and more stressful. Wednesday is what I usually call my meeting hell day, anyway, with three half-hour meetings and two one-hour meetings every Wednesday (frequently running over), plus another one hour meeting on alternate Wednesday. Yesterday had the biweekly meeting plus an urgent extra meeting. And it was a day I was supposed to release a documentation set. Which means I’m trying to keep working during every meeting.
All of which contributed to the stress. And since the stress started so early in the day, there was no way to know how much of my feeling rotten was because of yet another day of moderate-high pollen count kicking my allergies up, how much because I had caught some kind of bug, and how much was because of the stress.
I got through the day. I hit my deadline. Some compromises were agreed to for some of the infuriating issues. And I was exhausted and still feeling rotten. I had planned to attend the Virtual Silent Reading Party again. What I actually did, after the takeout my husband picked up for us for dinner, was log into the party, then curl up with pillows and a blanket where I could hear the piano music…. and slept for a bit over four hours.
When I woke up, my temperature was back down to 97.3. I didn’t feel good, but I felt a whole lot less awful. I was awake for a while and tried to finish the blog post, but I just couldn’t string words together. This morning when I woke up, many of the symptoms had subsided. My temperature was 96.1. I felt much, much better.
The pollen count today is much lower today than yesterday.
The game that I usually wind up playing for the ten-ish months out of most years that pollen, spore, and/or mold counts are high enough to trigger my hay fever is “Cold or Allergies?” The first few days of even a severe cold are impossible to distinguish from a bad hay fever day. Because on a bad hay fever day I won’t just have sinus congestion and itchy eyes. I can have a cough. I can have gastrointestinal symptoms.
This year the game is “Cold, COVID, or Allergies?” And it’s just about every single day since early February. And it’s exhausting.
I still don’t know what was going on yesterday. Did I catch a bug when I went out to pick up a prescription a few days before? A minor virus that only took my body a couple of days to defeat? Was that plus the hay fever and the stress the whole explanation? Did I catch something worse than a minor virus, one that made me feel sick for a few days and now the symptoms are subsiding not because I’ve completely over come it. So am I contagious with whatever it is?
I don’t know. Fortunately since I’m already working from home, washing my hands a bazillion times a day, wearing a mask whenever I go out, and so forth, I’m not likely to infect anyone if I do have something, whatever it is…
“The venn diagram of people protesting shelter in place orders because they don’t like ‘the government telling them what to do’ and people who think the government to tell pregnant people who want abortions what to do with their bodies is one giant f-ing circle.”
I had planned to write something else today, but then I saw this post on tumblr:
(Click to embiggen)
“You’ll notice that LGBT pride parades are being cancelled, and LGBT people are not complaining and calling it an injustice. Meanwhile, Christians are calling it an injustice that churches are being closed, and conservatives are calling it an injustice that stay at home orders exist. That’s because LGBT people actually experience injustices, so they know when an injustice is happening. They face way too many injustices to label everything they don’t like as an injustice. And they’re not defying social distancing orders to have the parade anyway.”
—theconcealedweapon.tumblr.com
“We also know the consequences of an unaddressed pandemic.”
—61below.tumblr.com
A couple of other things worth noting. The U.S. stock market started going down in response to pandemic concerns the week of February 20, many weeks before the first stay-at-home order. The Dow Jones officially crashed (prices dropping so fast it triggered an automatic suspension of trading) on March 9th. There were no stay-at-home orders in place anywhere in the U.S. at that time. Companies were already laying people off and cutting back hours in anticipation not so much of stay-at-home orders but the fact that simply having lots of people sick, lots of other people afraid of being sick, and so forth was already causing people to cancel travel plans and so forth.
My employer, for instance, in early February cancelled most schedule employee travel (for sales, installation, and trade shower appearances, for instance) out of an abundance of caution.
Personally, in mid February I woke up with a fairly severe cough on a day that wasn’t scheduled to be a work-from-home day, and decided since I didn’t know if I had a something that I shouldn’t go into the office. The following week, again out of an abundance of caution, upper management encouraged everyone who could work from home to do so full time. Again, this was weeks before stay-at-home orders had been issued in any of the states where my employer has offices.
And when people are working from home, a lot of small restaurants, coffee shops, and the like in the vicinity of office buildings have a sudden significant drop off in business. So employees at those businesses get their hours cut. And so they have less money to spend on anything, and that means they cut out (first) non-essential spending, which causes more small businesses to cut hours, and it becomes a self-perpetuating downward economic spiral for everyone.
Lifting stay-at-home orders isn’t going to make everything spring back. It’s going to put a lot of people in the position of deciding to risk getting infected or starve, because if the order has been lifted not working is no longer involuntary and therefore they can’t collect unemployment. The science of the virus tells us that when people stop doing the mandated social distancing, infection rates will start rising again within a couple of weeks. And they will spike if we don’t have adequate means of testing people and a system for tracking down other people who have recently come in contact when an infected person, and so on.
Which means people will get scared and will cut back on activities that put them in contact with others and we continue to have places like restaurants, bars, theaters, and so forth not making enough money to pay their employees, et cetera.
Note: My cough went away after about two weeks and I never had a fever… but the cough has come back several times. So far, still no fever. I have long suffered from severe hay fever and sometimes when the pollen count has been high for many days in a row, in addition to sinus congestion and typical allergy symptoms, I also get a cough. And we’ve had a lot of really high pollen days during the last two and a half months, so that’s probably what it is. Probably.
But we’ve had a bit of a scare because yesterday my husband was running a fever and had some non-repiratory symptoms that sometimes occur with the coronavirus… today his fever is gone and the other symptoms are subsiding, but that’s not necessarily proof that he’s well.
Once again, here’s some news that either broke after I assembled this week’s Friday Five, or is a new development in a story I’ve linked to or commented on previously. Plus more commentary than goes in my Friday Five posts.
Or maybe not? Member of defiant Central church dies from coronavirus illness. Oops! No one saw that one coming, I guess. Virginia pastor who defiantly held church service dies of coronavirus. Or this one, either. I heard a clip on one of the news podcasts I listen to, where a woman who was leaving one of these church services kept repeating that she couldn’t get sick, because she was covered in the blood of Jesus, just like everyone else in the congregation. When the reporter asked her about people she might encounter afterward who weren’t church members, she replied that if they were covered in the blood of Jesus like she was, they had nothing to worry about.
I can’t find any passage in the Bible where Jesus claims his followers are immune to communicable diseases. It just isn’t there.
And while we’re on the topic of misinformed people trying to spread misinformation, Watch Dr. Tony Fauci debunk Laura Ingraham’s comparison of HIV treatment to treating coronavirus – Dr. Fauci: “Laura, this is different. HIV/AIDS is entirely different”. I have pointed out some similarities in that way that some people are reacting to this epidemic and how they reacted to (and still are) the AIDS epidemic. But that was about attitudes of people toward the victims. Not about how the two diseases spread. AIDS is not infectious through casual contact. HIV take years, many years, to become a threat to the person’s life. And eventually, we developed treatments that let people go even longer without getting sick, and it turns out that those some treatments make the person no longer capable of infecting others (as long as they stay on the meds). A vaccine would still be preferable to the regime of taking a cocktail of anti-viral drugs for decades.
This disease is communicable through casual contact. Because this virus is new to humans, there aren’t large fractions of the population carrying anti-bodies to older strains of the bug like there is for flu. There is no vaccine like there is for some strains of flu. And there is no effective treatment. None: Malaria Drug Study Halted Over Heart Arrhythmias.
And let’s close with this reminder of what our narcissistic president sees as being the important part of a disaster that has killed tens of thousands of his citizens and put more than twenty million out of work:
Over at FiveThirtyEight dot Com they have this wonderful explanation in comic strip form of why mathematically modeling epidemics and pandemics is so difficult:
(click to embiggen)Time for some stories that either didn’t make the cut for this week’s Friday Five, or came to my attention after I composed the Friday Five post, and/or represent new developments in stories I’ve commented on previously. With more commentary/ranting from me than usually appears in a Friday Five post. And we have some doozies this time! Pour yourself your favorite calming beverage and buckle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
First, I’ve linked to stories earlier about how some (evil) people have argued that letting part of the population die to keep the economy going is an idea to consider. Well, that’s not the only awful thing people have proposed regarding medical treatment for Covid-19 patients: Autistic support group ‘told it needed Do Not Resuscitate orders’. Or as one blog buddy put it: “Anyway, kill crazy normies control medical rationing.” So the assumption this medical group was making is that people who aren’t neurotypical, if they became sick with Covid-19 are not worthy of the most intensive medical care, because supposedly their lives aren’t as valuable as other people’s. Sure, the story ends by saying the letter had been withdrawn after people protested, but…
Let’s move on to another kind of misinformed medical idiocy: Kansas Republicans Undo Governor’s Coronavirus Order Prohibiting Large Religious Gatherings. That’s right! Because quarantines are a plot to block other people’s religious freedom. And spare me the a-hole pastors saying “We’re willing to die for our faith!” That isn’t what this is about! It isn’t about you deciding whether to risk your life, it’s you deciding to put every single person you come in contact with afterward at risk! Because you can carry the virus and be contagious for days before you feel any symptoms. And one person can cause a lot of illness:
Meanwhile, the grifter-in-chief is making really bad decisions: Federal Support Ends For Coronavirus Testing Sites As Pandemic Peak Nears. He’s lied about how anyone who wants a test can get one. He’s lied several times claiming he hasn’t heard anyone calling for more testing for weeks. And now, it appears, that he’s stopping the federal funding of tests for no other reason than, if fewer people are tested, the number of known infections won’t go up as fast as the actual infection rate. In other words, he’s cooking the books. He’s treating this thing like it’s all about ratings, and not actual lives.
And it’s worse than that: Supplies could be delayed due to confusion from the White House, companies say. The headline is a bit misleading. It’s not confusion, it’s that certain people in Trump’s circle are telling companies not to ship supplies to blue states. In other words, politicizing the pandemic. Which shouldn’t surprise us, because they’ve been falsely accusing Democrats of that for months, and one of the few things you can count on this alleged president and his thugs to do is accuse other people of the crimes they are actually committing themselves.
When it first happened, I figured it was just the usual stupidity from the guy. Someone mentioned it to him, and as a narcissist suffering from some form of severe dementia, he has a constant need to say stuff that make it sound like he knows what he’s talking about. But after being debunked a few times, and after at least one person died trying to self-treat with it, why did he start talking about it again?
Well, it turns out it’s about greed, because of course it is: Pharma-Funded Group Tied to a Top Trump Donor Is Promoting Malaria Drug to the President. That’s right, some of the companies who make the drug that doesn’t work against this thing are donating money to Trump. So, of course, he’s going to tout it so people will buy it and put money in the pockets of people putting money in his pocket!
This shouldn’t surprise us, because Trump’s entire financial career has been about stealing from his investors, contractors, employees, and charities. It has also been about tricking other people into paying for his projects and making it look as if he was the person who raised the money or donated or whatever. All those seasons of his reality show, when at the end the winner (or a charity) got a big novelty check that made it look as if Trump was paying them? Every penny actually came from the network. Neither Trump or any of his businesses contributed so much as a dime. He was paid, the network paid for the production and everything related to it, the network paid the actual award money, and on those occasions when a Trump business was mentioned or a picture of one of his buildings was shown, the network paid said business a royalty.
Trump is also really good about blaming other people, no matter how implausible the blame is: Trump Earns “Pants On Fire” Rating For Insane Claim He Inherited “Broken” Virus Tests From The Obama Admin. So Trump is now claiming that the reason we have been so behind on testing is because Obama left behind thousands or millions of “broken” test kits. Big problem with that lie: when Obama was President, know one knew that the virus which causes Covid-19 existed, yet. So no one had tried to make kits, yet. The problem is that Trump didn’t think the disease was serious (or that it would hurt anyone he cared about), nor was he willing to take and pay for kits from any of the foreign entities that had developed them as the disease swept through parts of China and other countries, nor was he willing to put any money into developing our own.
Unfortunately, his base doesn’t seem to be smart enough to do anything but swallow the lie. Even when the evidence is overwhelming:
How Trump and Kushner Failed on Testing and Ventilators: A Closer Look:
Once again it’s time for some news that either came in too late for this week’s Friday Five, or is a new development in a story I’ve commented upon previously, or otherwise didn’t quite make the cut before. As you can tell form the title of the post, I’m going to be talking about a lot of bad people here. If you would like a laugh, instead, scroll down to the bottom and click on the video. And learn something while you’re at it!
First up, you remember that there are a few Senators and Congresspeople who made suspiciously timed decision to sell of stock after getting classified intelligence briefings on the coronavirus threat? There is a bit more news on that front: U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s most recent financial disclosures show that millions of dollars in stocks were sold on her behalf at the same time Congress was dealing with the impact of the coronavirus. She continues to insist that these transactions were carried out by her financial advisor without any discussion with her, but the more news comes out the less credible that seems. She and her husband (who happens to the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange) didn’t just happen to sell off stocks in industries sure to take a big hit when the pandemic hit U.S. shores, but they also coincidentally bought up a lot of stock in companies that manufacture medical face masks and the like.
Right, coincidence!
Even though we now know that she had been briefed on the grim statistics of how quickly the disease would spread, how many millions would eventually get sick, and how high the death toll could go, she was making public statements to constiuents and donors that there was nothing to worry about.
The Strategic National Stockpile of critical medical equipment was created by an Act of Congress in 1998. And the act specifies that the purpose is to make sure those critical medical supplies are ready to be deployed to any state or territory where a critical public health crisis arises.
“Gangsters don’t hire family members because they’re qualified. Gangsters hire family members because they’re less likely to talk to the FBI.” (Click to embiggen)I know he’s an idiot. No, seriously. He’s what certain types of really stupid people think is a smart person. Which means he’s good at lying on his feet and using words that sound like he knows what he’s talking about. But he’s an idiot and a con artist, who couldn’t pass a basic security check and is in office (in violation of The Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute) because Trump wants him there. His motives are not public service, his motives are always his own personal gain, and the personal gain of his patrons. And ordering someone to change the government website that describes the reserve doesn’t change the law.
Remember, Kushner is the idiot who did this: Inside Jared Kushner’s coronavirus research: A wide net on a giant Facebook group. That’s right, he had access to all the experts at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and so forth, but what did Jared do? He called his brother’s father-in-law who happens to be a doctor.
“He took advantage of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. He targeted elderly investors and individuals attracted to his Christian ideals and then stole from them.”
—lead prosecutor Alexis Goldate
Yeah, great Christian values, there.
Okay, enough about bad people. Here is a helpful video for those who need a face mask for their next excursion. I hope it at least makes you chuckle:
Font Folly 