In case you were wondering I do feel guilty and upset at myself when I swear at long-time readers and call them Vichy. In my defense, the reader hadn’t bothered to take in what I was saying about the clusters of the virus, or to address them honestly, and instead tried to hector me with supposed superior knowledge, never considering whether I knew anything about it/had read extensively about it.

So, pull up a rock and let’s talk through this, okay? Your fears, my fears. And why I’m suffering from PTSD and the other day cried while driving through Denver to pick up food at our favorite place, because I felt all that was left behind was the shell of the only city that ever felt (truly) like home.

Let’s begin with: Nobody knows anything.

I’ve said before that we’re going into an increasingly ignorant age.  Not because data collection is impossible, but because our society is so complex and dispersed we each know only a very small part of what can and will influence our lives or perhaps completely destroy them.

It was always like that, of course.  Big, flourishing cities pre-Black-Plague didn’t know their end was coming.  But in a way they had it easier. First, because they didn’t think EVERYTHING was knowable.  Only G-d knew everything, and ultimately their fate was in the hands of G-d.  As a society, they knew/believed that this world was a transitory place, and what mattered was their eternal faith.  And over that they had full control by their behavior.  (Which in turn descended into a lot of legalistic stuff about doing all the right things, even if those things were external and small.)
Regardless of personal faith, society as a whole does not believe that any longer. Society believes, rather in living as long as possible, because as individuals we’ve lost our moorings in the world/time.  We no longer feel that our lives don’t matter so much — maybe — but we’re part of something bigger than ourselves that will continue long after we’re gone, and to which our contributions matter.

On top of that, we have some idea of the vastness of the world, our smallness in it, and that someone across the world having bat soup a la mode can mean we and ours will die without being able to do anything to prevent it.

This is a situation designed to induce madness, particularly when all our news apparatus is trying its best to drive us to panic fear, because they think they can use it to then panic us into socialism.  Destroying the economy is a plus value in this, as then we’ll need (they think) socialism.  Socialism never really fixes such situations, but it is often something people embrace when desperate (before they get defeated and starve.)

The problem here is REALLY nobody knows anything.  It seems like every other day a new theory about what this virus is comes out. The latest onne is that it de-oxygenates the blood itself, rather than merely making it hard to acquire oxygen.  Look, it’s possible. It’s just not PLAUSIBLE and the person expounding it lacks the credentials.  OTOH Medium took it down, which these days is almost a sign of its making sense.

If that’s true, btw, transfusions, not ventilators are the needed thing.

But then again…. Take the bilateral “ground glass” x rays.  Do they mean anything?  I don’t know.  I know that when I was dying of pneumonia, a nurse tried to stampede me into a biopsy (they really wanted to give me one, even though they ADMITTED it would probably kill me) by saying I had “bloody holes” in my lungs.  I didn’t. She didn’t know how to read an X-ray.  I’ve heard from professionals that the pattern is just “bilateral pneumonia.”

The low oxygen and still breathing fine was how I presented when I had intercellular pneumonia (That what I was told later. It makes no sense to me) X-rays didn’t detect it, though you could hear it, and eventually a highly skilled radiologist pointed out I did have signs of pneumonia in the x-rays. Before that, except for my low ox they’d have thought I was hypocondriac.

It is that illness, more than anything that makes me doubtful of almost everything we hear.  You see, medicine is more art than science.  We tend to think “Oh, you take a test, and you know for sure.” but that’s not true.  I hear we have a test that’s accurate in 85% of the cases, but it is not in wide distribution. Our best right now is 70%. Which means Winnie the Flu is being diagnosed on a ton of things, but ultimately it’s being diagnosed the way it was in China: if you present at the hospital with bilateral pneumonia and with a host of symptoms that change every day and with every whisper out of the medical community, they assume it is Winnie the Flu.

And I keep remembering that experience and thinking of three doctors screaming at each other in my room (my husband says I was being treated by committee)  each convinced I had something completely different.  The candidates were: a disease from a fungus that grows in Brazilian caves (later it emerged this doctor thought that Portugal was right next to Brazil. A not uncommon error.) An hereditary disease of Russian Jewish MALES (note this doctor never asked me if my kids were biological, but really!) An auto-immune attack.

These were all brilliant people, good in their specialties. They had tested me for everything under the sun. And they had no clue what was going on.

The ER doctor — now I know a lot of doctors, I understand they can be very good or very bad — who was a bit of an old hippie (they too can be very good or very bad) and whom at first I thought was a nurse because he was the LEAST egotistical person I ever met and introduced himself as “just call me Johnny,” told me they were getting a lot of cases like mine in. All between 20 and 40, all otherwise healthy (yes, the chart said obese, but I was at most 10 lbs overweight. I just never fit the “skinny charts.” Current doctor has more realistic views. Things change) and all showing the same symptoms, including the fact our immune system wasn’t reacting. I.e. I had a raging infection but no fever.

He put me on (then new) IV Zithromicin and a tablet.  (We got a copy of the process at the end of it, for my SIL in Portugal to read, and I wonder where we put it in the end. I have a strong feeling the tablet was chloroquine. I hear that it’s been used for years in conjunction with Zithromicin (yes, I know I’m spelling that wrong. I am dyslexic and hate medicine names.) when doctors face a viral infection that is not responding to anything else.  Anyway, Johnny (bless him) put me on this stuff, and over the next twelve hours I started improving markedly.

Then the specialists came, assured me what I had was not an infection because I had no fever and my immune system wasn’t responding.  The antibiotic would do nothing and the other drug was “just nasty.”

After twenty four hours of non-treatment, I was found blue in the middle of the night (as in “you were a lovely shade of cyan” said the nurse who found me) and put in ICU. Where I continued to get worse, and they wanted to do surgery. Or alternately hit me with really large doses of anti-histamines, or…..

In the middle of this, after consulting by phone with SIL in Portugal who told him they were seeing the same cases over there, same age range, and that they were treating exactly as Johnny had, husband demanded they put me back on it. Doctors refused.  Husband, for first time in our entire married lives exerted the “you said you’d obey me” and ordered me to get dressed. We were driving to the other hospital in town and seeing if they did it. And if not, we were driving to Denver and hitting all the hospitals.

For perspective, I was so oxygen deprived, my heart had swelled to three times its size and I was tachycardic to the point they wouldn’t let me get up to use the bathroom. Or sit up. Or anything, really.  And honestly? I wasn’t sure husband was right. And SIL hadn’t SEEN me, and all these learned doctors were so sure (except where they didn’t agree with each other.)

But husband ordered, I had promised to obey. And I’m a woman of my word. So I sat up and — very slowly — started dressinng.

Doctors PANICKED. As I remember the words were “Fine, but you’ll see it will make no difference.”

Three days later I walked not just out of ICU but out of the hospital, under my own power.  In my last interview the Pulmonologist told me I’d be back in months, a year at most “because that wasn’t pneumonia.” I had pneumonia a couple of times after, but they were walking pneumonias and not the crazy thing that almost killed me at 33.

Now, other things came out after that/during that.  For instance, for half a day while moved from ICU I shared a room with a woman my age, who had the same symptoms but who took the “massive dose of anti-histamines” route. The infection had raged like fire on which you pour gasoline. She was suffering serial organ failure.

I later learned — through a local interest newspaper story — that there had been 40 or 45 similar cases in our small town, and that the ones who had Johnny’s seat-of-the-pants ER doc treatment had avoided ICU and walked out in two/three days.  (BTW because my case had got much worse before they put me on the treatment again, I was on THREE zpacks a DAY for a month after I got home. And I was debilitated for year.)

Okay, forgive me that long excursion. I wanted to explain why we’re getting a cacophony of contradictory symptoms. It’s not abnormal, when it’s a new virus. (BTW, we never figured out what the thing in early 96 WAS. All we know is it ran through science fiction conventions, probably explaining some of the age bias since they ran “younger” then. And I’d never been to one of them, but I was in touch with someone who had.)

So, the problem with Winnie the Flu:

Nobody knows anything. We get all sorts of contradictory reports and crazy theories.

It’s politicized.  Things are being attributed to it, both infections and deaths that almost certainly aren’t. Because under its cover, a lot of mayors/governors can get assistance with their failing budgets.

The tests suck. The tests suck like a hoover.  This leads both to diagnosing it by symptoms, and probably to some number of false positives. This in turn muddies the “treatments that work” thing.

The media has seized on it I THINK not even out of a coherent desire to oust Orange Man Bad, but because they’re giddy at their new found relevance.  They were being ignored when people had lives, but bored and scared people at home keep turning on the news, and getting sad cases and ‘certainties’ from various places and “it’s coming for you.”

I have people reporting spouses (almost always women, because were more susceptible to mass behavior. It’s just part of how we’re wired) so terrified that they refuse to leave a room in the house, demand everything sterilized and won’t let the kids play outside because the virus might get them. This is not rational behavior. It’s hysteria.

I’ve run into people suffering this, and they keep coming back to “millions will die” which is not only unlikely but — at this point — bloody impossible. So the only thing I can figure is a steady drumbeat of fear from the media is panicking everyone.  And the media is relishing it like an aging actress given one last leading role, and feeding on itself.

Speaking of feeding on itself: we’re not only suffering rule by experts, but we’re suffering rule by geeks with no perspective of anything else. I DO yield to just about anyone in my admiration for Dr. Fauci. He is a “political expert.”  I.e. a scientific expert with a talent for politics. I’m always wary of those.  His history is patchy. But dear lord, he has the limelight and he loves it, and he’ll NEVER relinquish it willingly. So never expect him to give the all-clear. He’s now saying that “hey, we will let you out when there are no more cases.” and asking us to bear the “inconvenience” which tells you he has no clue what the shutdown is doing to the economy and people’s lives.

Oh, and let’s — do — touch the psychological. Like a lot of raging introverts, I should be fine with this. It’s not even that different from normal every day life for me. We work from home most of the time, though we usually have a date night Saturday afternoon/night where I get to SEE people and interact minimally with them (like to order dinner.)  We do museums, the gardens, or the zoo, at whim.

So, why am I coming unglued? Partly because those outings, apparently, are absolutely necessary. But also because in normal times I can get a wild hair and drive to the hobby store and get some fabric or paint to try something. I rarely DO, but I can. I can go to the nursery and get roses. I rarely do, but I can.  And when I go to the grocery store there aren’t normally distancing nazis and YOUNG PEOPLE (it’s always young people) wearing masks and looking terrified. (I’m okay with anyone with white hair wearing masks. Meh. You should be responsible for yourself. Though the homemade fabric masks don’t do much. But the proportion is one white haired person to ten young and looking terrified people.)

Also, you guys know something of my history: lockdowns and curfews terrify me. I’ve never had one being about what it says it is. They’re always about controlling people, and we usually find out WHY months later.  So, yeah, the PTSD makes me less than rational.

HOWEVER most introverts are reacting as badly as I am and a friend in law enforcement says they ARE seeing the hokey-curve of deaths. By suicide.

So– What do we actually KNOW is going on:

• Something ravaged China. There are probably 10x to 16x the deaths they reported. I was tracking this through December, as were a lot of people, probably a lot of them here, and I was panicking at the hints of how bad it was.
  Because China is incredibly secretive, we don’t know what happened there, though. And the virus could be that virulent there for other reasons, including pollution or malnutrition. Or they could be using the virus to cover deaths of famine and internal purges. Who knows? It’s China.
  Keep in mind that part of the panic as we watched China is that we are used to the idea “the killing plague will come out of China.” This is true in 90% of apocalyptic fiction.
• We DO know the outbreak in Wuhan was massive. It doesn’t seem to have been that bad in the rest of China, btw. BUT the outbreak in Wuhan was bad enough that it panicked China into shutting down HARD and hurting themselves.
  OTOH see what I said above: lockdowns and curfews are ALWAYS ultimately about controlling the populace because rulers are scared of THEM not of the ostensible emergency.  And there were rumors of Hong-Kong like outbreaks in mainland China.  WAS China using the virus to hide unrest/etc? Were they shutting down because that was preferable to being unseated? We don’t know. I’m going to go with “they panicked at Wuhan blowing up out of control and assumed the rest of the country would go up too.”
• Which brings us to something else we know and have seen over and over and over all over the world: this is a virus of clusters.  It gets bad in clusters. It’s not even noticeable elsewhere.
  While all the clusters are in dense cities, not all big (or even dense) cities get outbreaks.  The favelas of Rio aren’t dead now, etc.
  So why is it bad in clusters? We don’t know. We can come up with a million excuses, but in the end WE DON’T KNOW. We can’t know. We can’t even guess.
  That guess above assumes people with higher blood ox (naturally) are less susceptible.  BUT that makes no sense, as it’s more severe on blood type A. And blood type A is NOT it for that.
• It mostly kills the elderly.  No, please, stop. IT MOSTLY KILLS THE ELDERLY.  Remember that anything pneumonia gets attributed to it. In some cities so do unexplained deaths.  So, yeah, there are — I THINK — at last count 45 “young and healthy” dead throughout the country attributed to it. It might even be true that all 45 died of it. Let’s say it is. That is so far below the number who die of “just unexplained shit” every day in the US without us shutting down completely that it doesn’t warrant worry. It certainly doesn’t mean EVERY young person, from babyhood to fifty is now at risk. They probably have a better chance of being stung to death by a bee.
  ALMOST all the dead are elderly (with co-morbidities, yes, but our elderly all have them. We’re in the uncomfortable place where the maladies of old age aren’t yet unavoidable, just survivable.)
  I’m not saying this doesn’t matter. I’m saying that this is a characteristic. So in this sense it’s a normal respiratory virus. The target population is the USUAL one.
• It has a LOT of asymptomatic cases.  I direct you to the Diamond Princess “closed study” as it were before everything went political. Most cases, something like 80% were asymptomatic.  You might not know this, but this is exactly the same as the flu. Most cases are asymptomatic spreaders, which is why we ESTIMATE flu mortality every year.  It also has a long incubation period, but here we run into those ever-moving “rumor” characteristics. The incubation period, when you feel fine but are getting ill ranges from 4 days to 21. It could be more. It could be less.  This makes it impossible to track spreaders, or even to know who’s at risk.
• Clusters don’t seem to appear randomly. They seem to be bad from the beginning (this militates to its having been here a long time, so it’s not a new infection. Yes, THEORETICALLY we could get new ones, but we’ve not seen that. The cluster-areas remain the clusters. I’ve hypothesized culture, but the truth is WE DON’T KNOW. We just know they’re clusters, and they remain clusters and other places don’t “cluster”.So, taking that into account, and also the fact symptoms are weird — I’ve spent 20 years telling people that NO, stomach flu isn’t flu, but damn it, this thing has stomach symptoms in some percentage of people. BTW, weirdly so did the one in 96 — and only hit a fraction of the sick, what do we have?
  I don’t know. I know the virus exists, because we’ve tested for it. But is it responsible for most of what we’re seen? I don’t know.  Is it horribly lethal? I don’t know. (Doesn’t seem to be, but then there’s Wuhan.)
  Honestly at this point if someone said the COVID-19 is something else completely innocuous and what causes the deaths is a virus yet undetected, I’d not be able to say “hey, this is wrong.”
  Because we don’t know anything.
  And that’s what’s panicked people. That plus the media screeching 24/7 that we’re all going to die and that the worst is ALWAYS “the next two weeks.”

  HOWEVER here’s other things we know:

• Right now, we locked up the economy put around 20 million Americans out of work, destroyed businesses, jobs and livelihoods, and are waltzing with famine this winter (yes, I know farmers are planting…. and in CA letting crops rot in the field, and being unable to find parts for machinery or buyers for their product. Milk is being dumped. Farmers are having trouble feeding their animals. The list goes on) for something that even with the dodgy diagnoses has cost round 10k to 12k lives so far.  Say that went ten times higher (HIGHLY unlikely.)  It’s still only “really bad flu season” since the estimate for the last really bad one is apparently 80k lives.
  Worse, as America is impoverishing itself, other countries are doing the same, partly because they KNOW we must KNOW something.  Not only are we going to be AT BEST really tight and poor next winter, we’re going to watch other countries in much worse straights, and we can’t help.
• Poverty and hunger, particularly sudden lead to civil unrest and war. And not just here, but all over the world. And we won’t be able to help.
• The dead are mostly elderly. The ones hit by the financial misery will be mostly young and might never be able to get the jobs/lives they need. We’re creating a lost generation to buy people another optimistically 2 years of life (most of the dead have more like 6 months expectancy.)
• We are piling on debt, which at this point we will HAVE to inflate out of.  Growing out of, which is what Trump was trying to do, is now a forlorn hope.
  Inflation kills savings and impoverishes everyone. it will hit hardest on my generation of late-middle-aged who probably — barring miracles — have seen our life expectancy curtailed from 80s to maybe mid-seventies, if we’re all very lucky.
• We’re putting the entire nation under massive stress.  We don’t know what causes cancer, but we DO know stress and psychological pressure contributes to it.MEANWHILE:
• Not only aren’t our homeless dying — and please, please, please, don’t tell me because they’re so sickly they resist this better. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS.
• One of the major foci is NOT in Rio, which held the Carnival.
• The wretched of the world, from Africa to Latin America aren’t ALL dead. And they would be if this were that deadly. They just would. Social distancing is impossible when you live on top of each other. And no, it’s not true that warm and wet weather keeps you healthy, or else why lock down FLORIDA?
• Our politicians don’t seem to be taking this seriously. As with global warming/cooling/climate change, or with the TSA, it all seems like drama and kabuki.
  If they were THAT worried that it was that bad, they’d be cracking down not on young people playing basketball or young families in parks, but in the homeless, clumping around and becoming foci of disease.
  A lot of the things being done are worse than “normal life.” Like closing schools and throwing kids into daycares (which, yes, is happening because people who work at “essential jobs” can’t stay home with them) which mix them with younger kids who spread disease more. And by closing most stores and leaving only grocery stores, it means more people are handling the same things, and crowding the same places and it’s actually impossible to keep 6 feet away in most of them.  IF the real risk was what politicians are pretending it is, we’d ALL already have died.MORE importantly, to me, we’re giving up our liberties to the WORST sort of politician without even token resistance. I’ve seen people who claim to be freedom lovers thanking their governors/mayors for LOCKING THEM UP and preventing them from work.
  Guys, once liberty is given up, it’s much harder to recover. And these people, from neighborhood snitches to Walmart nazis, to power mad mayors and governors REALLY ARE the worst sort of bully, closing parks (instead of merely issuing distancing guidelines.), arresting people kayaking int the middle of the ocean, and frankly behaving like tin pot dictators.
  At the national level we have a political class crowing with delight at “the end of Western civilization” and trying to get their Green New Deal crazy cakes environmentalism implemented on the back of this. Watch if they don’t try to keep travel restrictions in place forever!
  I’ve been through this before. Once you have a population that thinks the government is its father and its mother and can keep them “safe” and that the government does everything out of benevolence, you’ll never, ever, ever be free.

  If we’re willing to do this to avoid what will be for sure even with all the doctoring, under 20k deaths, what will happen when they tell you how many people die by driving? Or that you can avoid heart disease if you stop eating meat? or that —  It goes on.

  And this is why I have been cursing out even people who probably don’t deserve it (but who should have thought about what I was saying instead of hectoring me.)  I feel like I’m in the middle of mad people tearing down our liberty and the structures of our exceptional country, because they think they’re ALL going to die fo something that’s not that lethal unless you’re really elderly, or are in the middle of a cluster.
  BUT more importantly — were it ten times more lethal — they’re willing to surrender to despotic authority to be kept “safe” from a danger that can’t be predicted or fully understood.
  Once you take that step…  well, you’re over as a free people.
  I don’t think — I hope — we’re there yet. There are too many of us going the other way. More every day.
  But the baffling unconcern and credulity of the ones rushing to be protected has me nervous, upset and above all disgusted.

  You, most of you reading this, were born free. You have no idea how rare and amazing that it.

  TRY very hard not to sell your birthright for a mess of totalitarian pottage.
  Not only does it never end well, but the world needs America. Now more than ever.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM CELIA HAYES:  Adelsverein:The Complete Trilogy.

The Adelsverein Trilogy, now combined in a single hardbound edition, is a saga of family and community loyalties, and the challenge of building a new life on the hostile frontier. They came from Germany to Texas in 1847, under the auspices of the “Mainzer Adelsverein” – the society of noblemen of Mainz, who tried to fill a settlement in Texas with German farmers and craftsmen. Christian “Vati” Steinmetz, the clockmaker of Ulm in Bavaria, has brought his sons and daughters: Magda – passionate and courageous, courted by Carl Becker, a young frontiersman with a dangerous past. Her sister Liesel wants nothing more than to be a good wife to her husband Hansi, a stolid and practical farmer called by circumstances to be something greater, in the boom years of the great cattle ranches. Their brothers Friedrich and Johann, have always been close – in the Civil War, one will wear Union blue, the other Confederate grey homespun – but never forget they are brothers. And finally, there is Vati’s adopted daughter Rosalie, whose life ends as it began – in tragedy. But Vati’s family will will survive and ultimately triumph. They will make their mark in Texas, their new land. Adelsverein: It’s about love and loss, joy and grief . . . and the sometimes wrenching process of becoming American.

FROM CYNTHIA HAYES: The Luna City Compendium #1: The Chronicles of Luna City, The Second Chronicle of Luna City, and Luna City 3.1

 

The first three volumes of the Luna City Chronicles , with expanded maps of the area, and of the town itself.

FROM CELIA HAYES:  The Luna City Compendium #2.

The second Luna City compendium, containing the complete text of Luna City IV, a Fifth of Luna City, and One Half Dozen of Luna City

FROM NATHAN BISSONETTE:  A Wizard in the Caravan.

In this sequel to A Wizard in the Monastery, the Wizard is enjoying time away from active wizardry when he is snatched from retirement to spy for the Crown. But the spell goes awry and his finds himself in a camel train on the Silk Road, hoping to find a way home. Ride along as he meets wizards, slaves and kings in what could have been The Greatest Story Ever Told, if only he hadn’t accidentally . . . .

FROM L. JAGI LAMPLIGHTER:  The Unbearable Heaviness of Remembering (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 5).

…She has discovered she has an older sister named Amber, who was stolen-away as a baby. Nobody but Rachel remembers her—not even their parents. Rachel is determined to find Amber and restore her to the family. But how?

She doubts it will be as easy as overhearing the name Rumpelstiltskin.

Meanwhile, Rachel has bigger problems. Wild fey have invaded the campus. If they so much as bewitch even one more student, Roanoke Academy will be forced to close its doors. Rachel and her friends must solve this menace before the academy cancels more classes or, worse, the Year of the Dragon Ball!

But she has hope—if she can keep the school open—because, as Rachel’s late grandmother told her, Masquerade balls are a time of wonder… when anything is possible.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: soothe

*For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*
*3/28/20 – note that the cover lettering has been brought into conformity with the previous book in the series, Witchfinder.*

Snippet 3

Embarrassment

Michael forged ahead, dragging Al into his room at the townhouse, and casually tossing over his shoulder at the butler “Hodges, can you get someone to bring up water and clothes for us to change? Will Seraphim be in at dinner?” He turned to Al by way of explanation, “We probably should dress for dinner. I don’t know if my brother will eat in our house or at the palace. I’m not sure how they manage but—”

“Lord Michael!”  the butler sounded shocked to his core, and Michael stared at him, in complete confusion. It was his experience that he sometimes couldn’t even remotely guess at what other people were thinking.  This seemed to be one of those situations, as he had no idea what the look of deep reproach in the old retainer’s face was all about.

Hodges cleared his throat, “You cannot possibly mean to wash and change in the same room.”

Michael paused, suddenly alarmed. It wasn’t so much that he could guess what the butler was thinking – he couldn’t – but the man looked as if there would be some high impropriety in changing clothes in the same room with a friend.  Michael couldn’t really guess why, since in the past he had brought home play friends and changed for dinner in his room, if they weren’t staying overnight.

However, that had been some years ago.  Without being able to fully comprehend it, Michael had a strong feeling that some threshold had been crossed since he’d started having to shave.  Once a week maybe, but all the same.

To this was added the memory that his half-brother Gabriel was known to prefer the company of males to that of females.  At least Michael had heard that without fully understanding it, and it seemed to him it meant he fell in love with gentlemen, not ladies.

Michael didn’t fall in love with anyone. The whole thing seemed to him a passel of trouble. Look at Seraphim having his life upended ever since he fell in love with a woman whose social consequence was greater than Seraphim’s home.  And as for Caroline and her romance – well.  He wasn’t even human, in some ways.

In Michael’s world, which he intended to keep as rational as possible as long as possible, romance was not only an infernal nuisance, but an irrational one. And he would have none of it.

And certainly he’d never, under any circumstances have anything to do with a scrubby schoolboy who fell out of windows in other worlds.  At any rate, Michael – for all he didn’t care at all – had started to realize that some women – particularly very beautiful and intelligent ones, like that Miss Monkton who had given a talk on magical electricity, which he had attended last summer – had… effects on him.  His palms sweated, his throat grew tight, he couldn’t think of anything to say, and altogether a lot of effects took place which Michael had never expected and didn’t like in the least.  So he knew for an absolute fact that when it came to avoiding romance, it was romance with women that he was avoiding.

Which meant that he should be offended by Hodges’ implication.  He tried to sound severe when he said, “Oh, no one cares for that. We should have some clothes that fit Al. Maybe from when I was younger? I don’t think he’ll be staying the night. He’s only here till dinner, I think. Just have some clothes and warm water brought up.  Er…. Not a bath. We’ll just wash our hands and faces and change?”

“Sir!”

“No, Hodges, I must insist.”

“And I, sir, must insist that no such thing will happen under his Grace’s roof.  If you please, follow me,” And Hodges led them into the small parlor.

Michael blinked.  Either his brother’s butler had gone completely insane, or there was something of a magical nature going on that messed with people’s heads.

It wasn’t just the refusal to let them wash and change in the same room. No. It went well beyond that. It was that they were being shown into the parlor.

Michael paced like a caged tiger by the windows, while Al sat, subdued, on a chair, his hands in his lap, as if he were still in the nursery.  Good heavens, was the boy still in the nursery? Was that why Hodges was acting so strangely?

But next a maid came in, bringing tea and cakes, which was a crowning insanity.

Surely, Al was too young for liquor. Michael was too young for liquor, besides not liking the stuff. But lemonade and cake would be a more appropriate snack for a schoolboy, would it not?

“I have no idea—”  he began, but Al was already pouring tea for both of them and helping himself to cakes. There was a vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows, as though he were trying to decipher a very difficult puzzle.

There was noise in the hall, noise unheard of in this elegant house: an argument and raised voices, between a man and a woman.  And Mrs. Hodges came in.  She was the housekeeper at the townhouse, a very respectable woman, who wore somber colors and whom Michael had never before seen disturbed.

He’d always assumed that she could plan a party for three hundred or nursery tea without getting flustered.  But now she looked flustered. Or she looked flustered until three steps in. And then she looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh.

She curtseyed to Michael, but spoke to Al, “Well, my dear,” she said, a hint of a smile on her lips.  “He has no idea, does he?”

Al shook her head.

“So I take it your acquaintance is recent?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Al said, his voice sounding a little shy and strangled.

“I see. And here is Hodges,” she looked over her shoulder at the her husband, “Saying that Lord Michael is getting ready to set up a Corinth.  You must forgive them. They are fools. They never actually grow up, they just stop having spots.”

Michael would have been offended, if he had the slightest idea what she was talking about. Except of course, that it included him and Hodges. Hodges, whose eyes he met, looked as dumbfounded as Michael himself.

“Go you, Lord Michael,” the housekeeper said, sounding exactly as commanding and maternal as she had when Michael had been ten years younger. “To your room. Have a proper bath and change.”

“But Al—”

“I’ll take care of your friend, sir. Do not fear.  We’ll bring… we’ll bring you both here when you’re done.  Word has been sent to your brother, but whether he will be in for dinner or not, we do not know.  There is some crisis involving fairyland, and it is that important.  But never fear, we’ll take care of the two of you.”

Michael was so confused he not only let himself be herded to his room, but he let his brother’s superior valet choose his attire after bath, so that when he dressed, he realized he was wearing the most formal of dinner attires, complete with breeches.

He thought to protest because while his brother might be married to the heir to the throne, he was still very much at home, and if anyone else were at dinner it would be family and….

And he forgot it all when he entered the drawing room.

There was a young lady there, who had a passing resemblance to Miss Monkton.  At least she had the same red hair, a mass of it, loose down her back, and very large green eyes with a startled expression in them.

Oh, she also had freckles, masses, but Michael had never understood why people would mind freckles. He found them charming.  She wore a very beautiful dark green gown, with … well, he was sure it was very nice lace, though he had no words to even think on it, much less describe it.

“Miss–  Madam—“ He stumbled.

Suddenly the features rearranged themselves, and he realized she was…  “Al!” he said.

She curtseyed. The damned chit curtseyed, very proper and all to him, as though he were some kind of important person and she a stranger! As though she hadn’t fallen from a window onto his magical row boat.  As if—

“Albinia Blackley, milord. At your service.”

Michael realized, with a start, this must be the whelp that Tristam Blackley had spoken of.  A bastard child?

He opened his mouth to answer, though he was not sure with what

That was when the window exploded.

I’m not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV.  And I did not sleep at Holiday Inn last night. But my kids took way more physics than needed for either of their degrees, and despite being 3 years apart in schooling took those classes together in college.

(Which was great. They can’t stand for one to outdo the other so not only were they top of the class, but had improbably great grades. Because younger one might otherwise slacken but not when there was a chance of older one doing better.  And older one, who always tried for perfect invented plus que perfect for the occasion. Had I known it, I’d have fought the state of CO to advance younger three years starting in elementary (he could take it) and they’d have been LEGENDARY.)

Since they were both living at home to save money, this meant that I was often standing in the kitchen minding my own business cooking, and they’d be telling what they thought were hilarious jokes, or trying to figure out that day’s problem and turning it into a joke.

Which is why I learned that there are physics assumptions that only work for ideal objects.  Or, as my kids put it (and perhaps it’s a joke from a show? I can be daft) “Imagine a spherical cow, of uniform density in friction-less vacuum.”

This came to mind about a week ago as I was stomping around the house saying that anyone who relied on computer models for anything should be shot.  My husband was duly alarmed, because as he pointed out, he has designed computer models.

At which point I told him that’s okay because his models do not involve people.  Which is part of it.  Throw one person into a model, and you’ll wish the person were a spherical cow of uniform density in friction-less vacuum.

But the reason the cow story is funny, of course, is that you don’t even need a person to upset that kind of very exact calculation, because cows are not in fact spherical or of uniform density, and would fare rather poorly in friction-less vacuum.

However, much worse than a person is a group of people. Particularly when the group has its own culture, its own geographical “plant” and its own way of being in the world. Throw those into any model, and even if what you’re trying to model is a single, small, fairly well known group, the model will have a leak.

You see, people don’t always behave the way you expect. And frankly, they find ways to get around things they don’t like.  Or they just  do unimaginably stupid and crazy things.

To be fair to the left they never have — and possibly never will — understand that.  Their whole program is the idea that human beings are fungible.  Having glomed on the idea some humans are not like the others, they of course decided to sort humans by external or largely irrelevant characteristics.

No, I DO NOT in fact understand why the collectivists, the people who keep wanting to do what the group is doing, and who are more socially oriented than any of us fail to get people.  Except perhaps that G-d has a sense of humor. (Low one, puts itch powder in your pressure suit.)

What I do know is that — are you ready? — human societies, involving multiple nations or even our own culturally diverse, geographically spread out nation, are not now nor will they ever be a spherical cow of uniform density in friction-less vacuum.

So…. why is it that even now that they admit the scary Imperial model is insane, our authorities, from federal on down are treating the US as though it were just that mythical cow, and on top of that exactly the same as the cow in Italy, Spain or France.

This is a stupid thing. What’s more important, it’s a stupid thing that’s not only killing the economy, it’s getting in the way of us figuring out what the Winnie-flu is, how bad it is, and what causes high-lethality clusters.

Let’s leave side for the moment the fact that the books are being cooked, okay. They are. this is undeniable. As is undeniable they’re cooking them the most in places like Louisiana and NYC, and we probably know why.

It’s hard to deny the disease presents in weird clusters.  I have a friend whose Georgia County is about the same level of bad as Italy.  Which makes no sense whatsoever, as they have no high Chinese population.  And while the  cases might be guess work (with tests only accurate AT MOST 70% of the time, it’s guesswork all the way down) the deaths aren’t. The community is small enough they all know each other. And they’re losing relatively young (still working) and relatively healthy (no known big issues) people.

The question is WHY?

In the same way, when I go to FB and I say “Is this really as bad as people claim,” people from NYC who have relatives in the hospital get very upset.

But instead, what we should be doing is applying the severe restrictions to places with these clusters, and figuring out why the clusters develop. (Instead of shutting down the economy of a nation of 320 million, and making people in Lone Cow Nevada follow the same restrictions as New Yorkers.)

Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sure, quarantines are justified. But that word doesn’t mean what we’re doing. Quarantines is when you isolate the sick. What we’re doing is mass house-arrest.

Which brings us into why this is crazy.

I can GUESS at some reasons why NYC has a lot more cases than anywhere else in the country. They are the closest thing to an European country in our midst, relying mostly on public transportation (or truly unsanitary taxis), living in apartment buildings with shared air circulation, keeping minimal personal distance in the street.

To all that add that there are problems with their health workers being third-world hires and as cheap as humanly possible. (I suspect Seattle has the same issue. In fact, other states do. Having heard stories, particularly of long term care homes, I’ve told my sons that if I ever need that (Please, no. Mom and Dad haven’t) and they can’t afford to send me to one of the best, just put rat poison in my tea.)  And OF COURSE there are problems with culture in that too.

So, I’ve covered this before, but here’s the thing: Italy has a completely different culture. Yes, it also has a sclerotic, understaffed and just impoverished healthcare system. (Yes, every time I post that I have to spam a million comments telling me how well the WHO ranked Italy — which is great, except the WHO ranks a single payer system above everything else, including outcomes — and how Lombardy is the envy of Italy or something, which leads me to say “Sucks to be you.”)

However, that’s just a factor in the debacle. The other factor is culture and no one is taking it into account.  Multi-generational families live together (I should throw stones, yes) or in the same house which becomes a sort of compound. (This is common to all Mediterranean cultures. I grew up in such a compound until the age of six.) which means that while Grandma isn’t abandoned to the tender mercies of Haitian health workers, it’s also really hard to isolate her when little Guido gets the never-get-well at school and cheerfully brings it home.  Even when they don’t live together, extended families have a level of closeness that freaks out even the closest American families.  If you and your relatives live within driving distance of each other and don’t see each other every other day, there’s something wrong.

Every house is a continuous cacophony of visiting relatives and friends.  In safer times, we just left the back door unlocked because it was easier than answering the doorbell every five minutes.  When I first got married, I had the TV on all day, because otherwise the house was so silent, it freaked me out. (I left Disney channel on all day, because it was less likely to startle me with explosions or evil laughter. This led my inlaws to believe I only understood “English for children” (rolls eyes.) I wasn’t even in the room with it. I just needed that noise, or I freaked out, because of the habit of a lifetime.

The freakiest thing in my exchange student years was that my family never had people drop by, several times a week, just because.

On top of that, of course, a lot of the younger people live in stack-a-prol apartments with shared air, and most people commute by train or bus or something.

Now, in Portugal at least most trains and buses aren’t as full as they were in my youth. You are rarely packed in like sardines.  But it’s still public transport, and at rush hour every seat is taken and there are people standing.

As much as I get sick here, I got sick way more often there, and had a few really close calls, starting at about thirteen. Because you live in each other’s pockets.

And I understand that in Italy, as in Portugal, as in, for instance, France, people kiss a lot more.  Adult men might not, unless they’re close(ish) relatives, but women and children get kissed by everyone from close kin to total strangers.

All of those create conditions for the virus to explode. In Italy, in France, in Spain.  I understand it’s not exploded nearly as much in Portugal, but I also wonder how much of that is Portuguese reluctance to go to the doctor or the hospital. Because “the hospital is where you die.” (Yes, sue me. Some cultural assumptions remain. Which is why my husband is the one who normally drags me to the hospital.)  Because, you see, we DO know for at least one of the clusters, the hospital was making it worse. Go to the hospital for any other reason, catch Winnie the Flu.

All of these uncertainties are even more uncertain with China, which is a culture that is, by itself and by design fairly opaque to us, round eyed devils. BUT because they are on top of that also totalitarians, the culture becomes double opaque.  As Writer in Black put it in the comments, paraphrasing:They lie because they lie, they lie when the truth will serve, they lie because they can get away with it, they lie when they can’t.

And we simply don’t know the conditions on the ground. Most Americans don’t know, and most “progressives” refuse to admit that China has air quality not seen in this world since London ran on coal and its air resembled pea soup.  I heard that their air pollution makes everyone, man, woman, preschooler and infant inhale the same amount of particulates and pollutants as a three-pack a day smoker. Or that China’s prosperity is mostly for show/limited to a certain class (as we said in Portugal “for Englishmen to see”) and in the countryside, and the lower classes, life is more or less medieval and very close to the bone.  So close it might have tipped into actual famine, once we engaged in curtailing China’s exploitative trade practices.  On top of which, the mode of life being medieval and the government unpredictable, most people live in close proximity to a food animal or two. Which–   Which has given us all the bird flus, the swine flu, and soon to come and excitingly another bird flu.

So, do we even know that China is locking up again because of Winnie the Flu? or because of the new bird flu?

We don’t and neither do they. Their diagnosis was by “has pneumonia” since their tests are THIRTY PERCENT accurate (a coin is more accurate) and honestly, they don’t care for the lives of individual citizens. They care to hide a debacle from the world.

So trying to understand why the Wuhan cluster happened and how bad it really happened might be beyond us.  As I write this China has gone into lockdown again, which will send the Western hysterics into convulsions and give those like my governor who hanker for well polished boots and a Hugo Boss uniform in red and black another excuse to stomp on our inalienable liberties.  (And if at the end of this there aren’t a thousand civil rights law suits, I’ll be seriously disappointed.)

Because in his mind, Colorado and China are spherical cows of uniform density in friction-less vaccum.  (Stupid or malicious? Well, in Polis’s case? BOTH.)

And dear BOB, guys. Colorado and New York City (or state) are not the same culture.  Heck, North Carolina and Colorado are not the same culture. I know, because I transitioned from North Carolina to Colorado.

Let’s put it this way, if you stand as close to people in Colorado as you do in North Carolina, we’re going to freak out. Give it another foot (and that’s a foot more than NYC.) Unless you’re obviously a tourist. In which case we’ll send you to the next city to look for something improbable.  And while we’re not an unfriendly bunch (truly) we are not precisely the kind that gets together in a big bunch for no reason whatsoever.  (Unless they’re recent transplants.)

When we moved to Colorado we belonged to a national social club. We tried to continue our involvement here, but eventually gave up, because though the group was larger, the meetings were small, odd, and kind of lackluster.  The explanation? Coloradans are OUTDOORS people. They’re out hiking trails, or, when urban, walking around.  Sure, they might eat at restaurants, or go to museums, but the natural group size for Colorado is one or two.

You observe this in our parks, during summer, when you stare at groups of more than about four, because they’re so rare.  And in museums, even when going through as a family, our family of five tends to go through really individually, just keeping the others in sight most of the time.  And we’ve been doing that since the kids were about five. And this is normal.

Yes, there are subcultures. But even our college students don’t really clump as I see in other cities/states/on TV.

Our NORMAL mode, with very few exceptions, is social distancing.  You see this better perhaps in church. Whenever I go to church out of state/country, I’m puzzled at people crowding towards the front, in big masses.  In Colorado it often seems like the law is “let me find a space no one can touch me.”

I understand — Colorado is the only Western state I’ve LIVED in — that in the west that’s more or less the norm.  That our normal standing-apart is about two and a half to three feet. (And though yeah, there’s outliers like someone sneezing, the normal spacing for virus transmission, is one and a half feet.)

This alone, not accounting for the fact that trying to get Coloradans together is like herding cats, makes us completely different from NYC.

Heck, we do have the train that was supposed to go between Denver and Colorado Springs (WHAT IS with socialists and trains?) but it is about halfway there, and frankly when we drive alongside it, it seems to be empty.  The use is probably not helped by the fact our state made it free for homeless (ride the murder and assault carriages!) But even the homeless aren’t at great risk, since they’re like one per carriage. Buses… about the same. Though there is one route where I’m surprised people aren’t dropping like flies, but then, really, no one seems to be except in clusters.

Frankly without the clusters, I WOULD actually think this was just the common cold or the greatest hoax since the Trojan horse.

So, why are the same rules being applied to both places? AND why are both places treated exactly alike? And why are both places assumed to be on the same curve as Italy or Spain or Wuhan, places and cultures, and ways of living that have absolutely nothing to do with how we live or who we are?

And here’s the kicker: if you allow states like Colorado and others that naturally self-distance to go about their lawful business, not only time but more money will be available to study the problem clusters.

What is actually going on is the entire world being punished because SOMEONE spit on the teacher’s desk and China won’t fess up it was them.

Which means this is what our “betters” in charge think they are. The teachers, the important people in charge, who must make sure all of us spherical cows of uniform density in frictionless vacuum do as told.

That’s all this is about: a fundamental misunderstanding of humans and cultures, and that individuals and individual cultures exist.

And these are the people who “believe in science.”  (A statement that by itself tells you they have no clue what science is nor how to learn it.)  And who presume to tell us how things will go.

Which is why we’re in the middle of killing our economy and destroying the wealth of generations, because we’re always — always — two weeks behind the peak.  Or, as one particularly mentally handicapped governor put it “We just have to keep pushing the peak off for the next year or two.”…. does he mean through non-flu season, and into flu season, and out of it again, till everyone who would have died of flu dies of famine, with a bunch more beside?

And again I ask all you, my fellow spherical cows of uniform density in frictionless vacuum: How long will you tolerate this?

So, to begin with, I am not dead. And I probably do not have the dread Winnie the Flu.  Why not? Well, I do not have a fever and some sense of smell has returned.  No, not all of it, but I can now smell the catbox when Euclid forgets to/refuses to cover (it’s hard to know with old codgers. It COULD be his protest against getting old, who knows?)  Taste is probably back at 1/2 percent. I can tell I’m drinking tea, not just sweet water.  From what I understand, the taste would not come back this quickly if it were Winnie.

I have since found that a lot of Corona Viruses — one of the normal causes of the common cold — and Rhino Viruses cause this symptom.  I have vague memories of losing taste and smell when I was very young and had some colds, but it’s been some time. Or it’s been some time since I noticed.  Look, over the last ten years I had symptoms far more worrisome than that.  Also, though my memory has recovered if not to the level it was at 30, there are some things that are forever lost in a fog of hypothyroidism and sleep apnea [(probably NOT brought on by the weight gain after the hypothyroidism got really bad, (which was since I was about 40, judging by the lack-of-potassium issues and others) but definitely exacerbated by it.  However, I’m one of the lucky, lucky people whose mouth conformation means I probably had sleep apnea since about 35 when ah…. tissues aren’t as youthful. I am now ALMOST the size I was at 35, if a little lighter, and I definitely still suffer from sleep apnea.]  I know because I have almost-finished novels I don’t remember writing, and sometimes I start reading a book and remember bits and pieces of it, but not the whole.

One of the downsides of it is that you forget bits of your lived experience. Like, you know, did I ever lose taste and smell with colds before? As I said, I remember it when very young, but not recently.

OTOH it’s not an unusual side effect of colds and allergies, apparently.  (It’s annoying, since tea with two drops of sweetener per pot is one of my joys in life. Apparently I’m not Connan.)

But this brings it to COVID-19. And how it’s being diagnosed. And how it behaves.

Yesterday a young acquaintance of ours got diagnosed with COVID-19 on SYMPTOMS.  This is what is technically known in Britain as “Bullocks.” Or perhaps “Bloody Bullocks.”

Why? Because there is no specific set of symptoms to Winnie the flu that aren’t partaken (Partoken?) of by other URIs.

The unique symptoms get bandied about, then contradicted by the next report.  “With Winnie the Flu you don’t sneeze” “You definitely sneeze with Winnie the Flu” “Winnie the flu has no body aches.” “Winnie the flu definitely has body aches.”  “Winnie the flu strikes only the old” “We’re mostly intubating your men between twenty and thirty” “Winnie the flu is a DRY cough” “The cough with Winnie the flu can be productive.”  “Winnie the flu shreds your lungs.” “So does any interstitial pneumonia.”

Honestly, the only thing you can say FOR SURE for Winnie the flu is that it takes longer (or its pneumonia) takes longer to recover from.  Ten days in ventilators are talked of, as opposed to three. Oh, and that your white cells don’t …. rise to the occasion as they usually do, almost as if you were immune suppressed.

Only, of course, some people are immune suppressed.  And though I no longer remember the exact explanation, when I had pneumonia but my blood cell count/immune system was also somehow suppressed, which they explained by my having had that same issue more than once and my body being “I can’t even!”  (Which btw is my highly scientific recollection.  Though you should perhaps remember I was oxygen deprived at the time.) So it’s not a unique thing with Winnie.

On “Who does Winnie the Flu kill, and how bad is it” we are about as confused as on symptoms, because apparently you know the US is not any more reliable on data than anyone else.

Why not?  Well, as I said, people are diagnosing Winnie the Flu IN A VIRTUAL APPOINTMENT without tests, and that is influencing our “infected” numbers.  At the same time, there are rumors that a slug to the chest, if you’re infected with Covid-19 makes you a death OF Covid-19 in certain populous districts of — oh, hell, in NYC.

And I do understand it is possible for doctors to say “yeah, he’d have survived if he weren’t ALSO suffering from Winnie the Flu” but–

BUT our numbers are in no way reliable. No one’s numbers are reliable.

Guys, I did tell you that unless we learned to do science properly again, and took the government funding out of it as the ONLY source for big projects (which means you find what the administration wants you to find — coff, climate science) we could no longer be an industrial/technological society.

What I didn’t know is that we could die from it. Or that that kind of uncertainty could be used to stoke panic.  I mean, not panic that would work.  They’d been trying to do this with Global cooling warming climate change.  But now they found a way of scaring us with as imprecise a set of statistics, as crazy a graph bar as any climatologist ever tried.

And it’s WORKING.

The effect and the insanity of the symptoms/age of death/etc being all over the place is exactly the same as playing telephone with a psychopath in the chain.  Which we might very well have, if the psychopath is China-fueled-media.

Which means it’s yet another situation of nobody knows anything.  Sure, Covid-19 EXISTS.  But is it any more lethal than the common cold?  We don’t know.  Is it really new? I honestly don’t know if there’s any way to even determine this, so I appreciate commenters telling me.  Or is it one of those many many coronaviruses that’s been circulating, which got blamed for the deaths in China (I’d guess famine and a bunch of other things. Up to and including, perhaps something chemical that got released during the military games.  Or perhaps, who knows, a mutation on a virus that made it slightly more lethal, or–.) Is it hitting some regions harder because somehow the percursor virus (if it’s a mutation) had avoided it?

Is it real, or is it memorex? will it float, or will it sink?

With our data collection corrupted, our information channels infused with the motives of a deranged, politically-motivated media, nobody knows anything.

All we know– foams at the mouth in civil liberties — is that our local governments who, out of an excess of respect for individual freedom claimed they could do nothing to control the deranged, dangerous and largely voluntary homeless, can now lock their entire population in their own houses “to protect us.”

All I know is that even if we come out of this at some point — I don’t know about y’all, but my governor is now talking July. He likes playing bondage games with the entire population. He likes it, my precious. — this will be tried again, and again and again.

PJ O’Rourke at some point said that (from memory) giving politicians power is like giving teen boys a bottle of whiskey and the car keys. I think he owes an apology to every single teenage boy out there. I think they’d do a lot less damage.

So, considering that nobody knows anything, when do we start demanding not just the numbers but what goes into the numbers? How tight they are? Who are they testing? Are they even testing? How is cause of death determined? etc.

How long till we make the decision that science must be scientific and that people with political motives should shut the hell up? How long till we name and shame the Chinese agents in the press and tell people “Yeah, but he’s infected with sino-propaganda/money virus.”

It was bad enough when all they were doing was wasting our money and squandering our kids’ future. But now they’re using lies to keeps us under house arrest. BTW the criminals and homeless are still — of course — allowed to roam free. Because apparently the civil liberties of the crazy, law breakers and interlopers are more important than those of citizens.

The media and the left have fully declared themselves as enemies of the Republic by any other words.  For our own good they want us to live in a socialist hell hole.

For their own good, I think we should deport them en masse to one. We’ll even let them choose.

Ultimately the Republic is OURS, not theirs.

How long will we the people TOLERATE this?

*Note I’m not doing an April Fool’s Post this year, because I think as a society we’ve had it up to HERE with pranks, right about now.
Note also that I woke up sans sense of smell or taste (when you have a 21 year old incontinent cat, you can tell when you lost your smell, and Russian Caravan, the tea you drink with a forkTM tastes of nothing. Even with sweetener and lemon it tastes only like vaguely sweet water.
This is universally reported as the first symptom of Wu-flu.  (I have a runny nose and a sore throat.) No, I don’t expect to die — not out of the question, with asthma, compromised lung function, etc — but I’m pissed at the prospect that I’m coming down with it, because I already lost two months this year to “mysterious, flu like illness.”
Even if I get very very ill, though, my opinion is the same. Short of actual black death numbers, what we’re doing to the economy is more dangerous than the disease. And will ultimately cost more in lives blighted and ended- SAH*

I think it’s very important to talk of the lives that will be destroyed or lost to this insanity of locking ourselves in our houses for fear of a virus. (Let me explain again, in quarantine, you lock up the sick. When you lock up the healthy it’s called house arrest. Yes, I am aware that there have been quarantines in the past. This is NOT — repeat not — a quarantine. Economic suicide. Collective insanity. Unprecedented violation of civil rights in peace time. It is all of that and more. It is not a quarantine.)

We’ll point out the obvious: there are people losing businesses they spent their lives building. There are people — I know some — who had just got a job which is now revoked. There are students who have just finished/are about to finish training, and who will be unemployed and crushed under student debt, no matter how sensible their training.

There is a risk of some number of these people committing suicide.  That will be “visible deaths” coming from this particular insanity.

But there will be also any number of hidden deaths.  Like the squid farms on Mars, which we hypothetically don’t have because we chose to fund the “Great Society” instead, these losses are invisible because they were never actually actualized. They were merely things that might be, and were in fact likely until governments (mostly state and local) decided it was a great idea to take the wheels off the economy, possibly because they were suffering from a terrible case of Orange Man Bad and knew they couldn’t elect their spokeszombie in the face of a thriving economy.  You know, things like people getting jobs, with good training, in a thriving economy.  People making enough money to marry, afford a house and kids.  People getting that first job, that eventually leads to other, better jobs.

But Sarah, you say, if this never happens, how can it cost us anything, much less lives?

It can cost a lot of things and yeah, lives. Perhaps not in the sense that people die, but in the sense that lives are not what they should be or even are wasted

As the mother of an unmarried young man about to finish his training with two engineering degrees and minors in another form of engineering, plus math and physics, yes, I am concerned that he’ll stay in the basement and never marry. While I come from a culture in which the younger child is often expected to stay home and look after the parents, that is not what I want or expect of my sons.

But it could be less dire than that and still bad: he is a jack leg programmer, and he might be able to make a living coding on a gig basis, and make do, more or less. But he’ll never do what he loves and spent 7 years training for. Whatever contributions he might eventually have made to aerospace engineering will be lost.

And I hear you say that all of us took paths we didn’t expect and many of us — or the most interesting ones of us — are doing things we didn’t train for and which would shock our younger selves. And I’m going to say “granted.”  And in most cases, those youthful dreams were misguided or not realistic. (Do you see me ruling the world and leaving it strictly alone?)

And I’ll grant you that too. But most of us are at least doing something adjacent to what we thought we would be doing (Journalist/novelist. Though I trained for translator and — rolls on floor laughing — diplomatic service.)

When this type of destruction hits an economy at the level we’ve inflicted in March 2020, what you see is a lot of diminished lives. Which in turn causes a lot of loss of interest/hope/etc.

Alvin Toffler might or might not be right about future shock. He was, however, absolutely right about cultural trauma caused by sudden and unexpected/unforeseen change, particularly when that change was negative.

Note there is credible reason to say Europe is dying from WWI.

On top of that, we were already dealing with extreme technological change, at a pace that was causing psychological problems.  Weirdly — this isn’t unusual when the wheels come off, so it shouldn’t be “weirdly” but most people think of a society being ruined as stepping back to an earlier level of technology. Unless the ruin continues to be enforced by government — Venezuelization or Cubanization — in fact ruin tends to accelerate technological driven societal change — this will only make the changes we were experiencing faster, because a lot of the digital revolution makes things cheaper/more streamlined.  Which means we’re more likely to go in that direction in hard economic times.

And a lot of us are over fifty. Not as many as in Europe, but still a lot of us.  Which means these changes will be hitting at just the right time to give a lot of people Unemployed Middle Aged Man Syndrome. (Note “man” because most women have other sources of “self” than job.  But not all. And my generation of women is more like men on that.) What this means is that some number of people will simply be unable to cope with changed work/life circumstances brought on by this insanity.

Yes, some will perhaps kill themselves, and those are visible. The invisible ones are the ones who go pottering into the sunset, alive but no longer able to contribute anything to society.

In that group, stress will also cause new and interesting forms of disease, including cancer, which a broke society might or might not be able to treat.

When people say we should stay “quarantined” (It’s not) till July, or for a year, or till the cows come home, “if it saves even one life.” this is what they and we must weight it against.

It’s all very well to say you won’t die FOR Wall Street. But will you die of the economy?

Because Wall Street is retirement plans. It is investment and innovation funds. It is rainy day funds.  All of these for middle America.  More than that, the economy and its ability to allow people to work for pay or find the food they need, or whatever IS lives.

Money is lives. All of us trade away some portion of our lives to produce goods and services which in turn get paid for and allow us to continue living.  It has always been so.  Since we’ve had money, money is simply a symbol, a way to keep track.

Money, and food and goods and services, and “simple” things like stores being open and stocked are LIVES. They’re hours and investments of people’s time and creativity.

How much of that do we burn to save lives. Where is the balance?
I don’t know. I know it’s possible to lose 1/3 of the population, particularly when that population is very old and forge on.  Sure, we’ll lose institutional memory, but we’ve already lost that, having decided to indoctrinate the last three generations in an utter vacuum of history or hard facts. (Sorry, but you know it’s true.)

Look, I don’t want to die more than the next person, and the next person is playing with the peaches of immortality.  It’s not that I want to live forever, or live for its own sake. But I want to live long enough to write 100 novels, cuddle four grandchildren, and … well, I want to live while I have things to do.

On the other hand, I know I’m 57 and not in perfect health. And I’ve survived expectations at birth for 57 years. So far so good. (Said the man as he fell past the 20th floor.)

I think a lot of our response to this is our fear of disease and death writ in sky high letters.

None of us is going to live forever. We’ve been dying since the day we’ve been born.

Sure, we have things to do and places to go. BUT it does no good to pay for our diminished future with the future of the entire society.

This fake quarantine isn’t free.  Life isn’t free. Nothing is free.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, in anything.  And the smart person asks the price before dipping a hand in the supposed freebies.

Caveat Emptor.

*I asked for this post after venturing from the house twice and finding water bubbling up from two intersections, then reading in the paper that people are flushing shredded t-shirts.  What the heck, even people?  So I thank the Walshs for providing their expertise- SAH*

Does It Flush? A Primer by Bill (and Caitlin) Walsh-

In these perilous days of calamity and toilet paper shortage, many of us face a question that we, in our nation of prosperity and plenty, have never faced before:

What can I flush down the toilet?

A number of us have faced it anyway–as landlords, the number of things we’ve pulled out of various pipes and septic systems is nothing short of amazing. The power of human ingenuity pales next to the power of human wishful thinking. But it’s spread like never before. The toilet paper-starved masses are looking to their commodes with a look of consternation and hope: Paper towels, newspaper, magazines… these will work as toilet paper, in a pinch. Can’t I flush them, too?

…yeah. No.

So let’s start with the Comprehensive List Of What You Should Flush Down the Toilet:

• Human Bodily Waste
• Toilet paper
• Soup

End, done, finito. If it’s not on the list, you should not be flushing it.

That said, because of certain… Common Habits and Dishonest Advertisements, shall we say, perhaps we should make a non-comprehensive list of things that definitely should not go down the drain:

• Tampons
• Condoms
• Baby Wipes
• Menstrual Pads
• Paper Towels
• Little Green Army Men
• Newspaper

Tampons are a really really big one. To the point that Dad always has a question to ask when a drain’s been snaked: “Did you find the mouse?” (Between the long squiggly “tail” (made of non-biodegradable nylon) and a week’s worth of sewage treatment, that’s what they look like.) If the answer’s no, you’re probably going back. Tampons do not flush. Do not flush tampons. Throw them in the trash.

But what about baby wipes? No. If they say they’re flushable: no. If it’s really covered in baby poop and you don’t want to see it again: no. Flush it and you will be calling us.

Now, both of these are at least of a material theoretically capable of degrading eventually (strings notwithstanding). Condoms? Forget about it. You will definitely be cleaning those out of your system sooner or later.

But that leaves a question: Why? What happens to your waste after we flush it? Let’s look into that.

First, it passes the trap in the toilet. This is a curvy piece just below the toilet, deliberately smaller than the pipe, designed to make sure anything that gets through can get through the pipes. When your toddler flushes a pencil, it gets stuck here.

This curvy piece also causes an air seal that prevents your toilet from stinking.

After that, it’s a three- or four-inch drain line, which is mostly smooth but (since nothing is perfect) has burrs inside that can snag things that shouldn’t have been flushed. (Like the tail on a tampon.)

Finally, it goes to the main, which is Not My Problem. But that doesn’t mean it’s nobody’s problem. Here’s an article on fatbergs I found: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46836867

Moving past that: Say the Bad Thing has happened. And maybe you don’t want to call us. (I mean, if you’re calling me as a handyman, let’s say it’s midnight on a Sunday… well. The bill won’t be small.)

What to do?

First, you have to figure out where the problem is. If it’s the sink trap, then it’s pretty easy. And it pretty often is! Except… we’ve already said we caused this problem by flushing. So let’s go to Part Two, when the problem is the toilet.

We’ll try a closet auger first. This is is a small metal snake, sort of like a really long spring. If the clog is still in the toilet unit itself, this’ll do it, and it’ll do it in a few minutes. Which is fantastic! Only… if the clog was in the toilet itself, you probably could have gotten it out with a plunger. So it’s pretty much never this easy.

So we go into the basement and look, with a thousand-yard stare, at the drain system. (Don’t have have a thousand yard stare yet? Don’t worry, it’s coming!) What you’re looking for is places where you can get in, places where the system can be opened. This is called the clean-out–a threaded cap placed in some parts of your wastewater pipes to allow them to be cleaned.

I want you to understand at this point that if the toilet hasn’t been flushing–and, regardless of when you noticed the problem, it’s probably been stopped up for a week–then everything you’ve been failing to flush… is in this pipe you’re about to open. Every. Single. Thing. I’d love to give you tips on how to avoid bathing in it once you get the pipe open (I can pretty much guarantee it’s over your head.) If you find out, let me know; “get a raincoat” is as good as I’ve come up with. If it isn’t midnight on a Sunday, maybe you can get a full-body suit to shield yourself. They’re called Tyvek Jump Suits and sold at Northern Safety, or possibly Lowe’s. They’re not your size, they’re the least stretchy things known to humankind, and they’re hot. Honestly, I’d just bank on taking a shower after. Multiple showers.

Also… the cleanout may or may not come off. That’s right, a poop shower is literally the good option. The bad option… is that the pipe breaks. Off. And falls on the floor. With a resounding crash. Because a lot of old-house sewer pipes? They’re cast iron. They weigh ten pounds a foot when they’re not full of effluvium.

(Don’t be standing under it.)

So let’s say you got lucky. The clean-out opened up, you accepted your excrement spa day with grace and aplomb.

You still have to unclog the pipe. But how?

The first thing is what we call “bagging it.” There’s a rubber garden hose attachment that, when attached to a garden hose and stuffed into the pipe, pressurizes the pipe and (hopefully!) forces the clog to break apart. It works! Sometimes! But a lot of times, the clog develops a hole rather than going downstream. The pipe won’t pressurize, and you’re up shit creek. Or, you know, not.

The next thing is Mr. Rooter, first name Roto. This is a minimum of a 150 pounds of angry, manure-encrusted machinery that wants to hurt you. Badly. And then get the cut infected with everything that’s grown in sewers within the rental area through the last year. This is a machine that, when you rent one, they give you a pair of heavy-duty gloves to go along with it. And won’t accept them back when you’re done. This is a clue: Wear them.

Then we get to using it. My grandfather used to have a saying when something was visibly being difficult. That saying was “Trying to stuff spaghetti up a wild cat’s ass.” This is trying to stuff wild spaghetti up a dead cat’s ass. The machine is stronger than you. The snake that goes in the pipe is a tightly-coiled spring. The tip binds against every protuberance inside the pipe. And coils up the spring. And makes it pop in random directions. And spring back out of the pipe. The outside of the spring occasionally gets snagged and creates a razor sharp burr. A burr you need to grab a hold of. While it’s spinning. (That’s a big part of why you need gloves.) It may have to go in there a hundred feet, one painful, manual inch at a time. It may have to go in there that far ten times, with different tips on it.

Oh, I guess I should explain tips.

There’s The Penetrator (which looks like the spade from a deck of cards), The Extractor (an open spring that will pull things back out), The Root-Cutter (a round sawblade. Those rusty cast-iron pipes will frequently admit tree-roots at the seams), and The Chopper (a pair of tines that poke forward for shredding toilet paper and such.) Congratulations, you’ve just gotten acquainted with the crappiest superhero team ever.)

And that’s it! In all my years of landlording, I’ve only ever had one clog that didn’t respond to some combination of these methods. (That one was in the sewer main, and officially Not My Problem.) But don’t give yourself a pat on the back yet: We still have one more thing to deal with.

Cleanup.

Well, no. I misspoke. You have to deal with cleanup. I’m going to go grab a beer and my decades of unresolved sewage-related trauma and go over there. Enjoy!

If a sane person screams in the forest of madness, but the circus goes on, did it really happen?  Asking for a friend.

Look, guys, I know I’m not exactly “sane,” since sanity consists of fitting really well with the herd. I remember being called crazy in the seventies in Europe, when I said that “hey, how come if Russia is so wonderful people risk death to get out of it?” “How come if Cuba is a paradise no Americans are floating in an inner tube to Cuba, instead of the other way around?”

I am, as you guys know, suspicious by nature, but I’m not BY NATURE a conspiracy theorist.  Even after things lie Journolist, I refuse to believe that most human beings can either create a conspiracy or keep it secret, in the face of being human and the temptations thereof.

But you know what? I don’t blame the conspiracy theorists this time. Believing that there’s something massive afoot beats believing everyone has gone howling mad.

I don’t in any way believe any of the fringe lunatic conspiracies going around from “this all to arrest pedophiles” (Oh, for f*ck’s sake people. Even if Trump COULD orchestrate that kind of operation, I wouldn’t want him to. Talk about abuse of executive power and cutting off your head to cure a headache. Also seeing pedophiles under every bed is kind of an American thing. You have to be born and raised here to believe it. Yes, like the Wu-flu pedophilia is really bad in certain sub-cultures and clusters, but probably not above normal human depravity.  And most of it is probably ephebophilia and a love for “almost legal” girls.  There is a baseline for this stuff across human history, and no I don’t think we’re any worse. Yes, a lot of them will be very powerful. That’s the nature of the game. BUT you don’t need a big secret operation to “get rid” of them, nor would that be the way to do it) or  linked to but divergent “this is when the democrats get arrested” (really, like all the prominent people in the administration who were also in Obama’s? Or do you have others in mind? Last I checked Hillary was still running her mouth.  Seriously. If you buy any theory that requires CHINA and IRAN to cooperate with the US government on a massive lie and you think that lie would be to our benefit, you aren’t naive. Naive is too mild a word for this.  I think you’ve gone crazy, just in a different way from the majority.)  And holy hell and all the furies, no, I don’t believe G5 is causing this. There is a danger of G5 being basically wholly owned by China and therefore vulnerable, but it’s not MAGICAL. I’m more likely to believe that G5 gives little girls the power to turn people into frogs.

Which leaves me with “What is going on?” And “How many of us are seeing it makes no sense and think we’re all alone?”

As I’ve said, I’ve taken contra-popular positions before, but never this much. I’ve never seen people go this crazy in my life time and believe obvious deception, including very smart people who’ve never fallen for this sh*t before.

I like to say this is because people who love this country would rather believe that we’re facing the black death than that we’re being systematically destroyed by an enemy, domestic.

This is not only not the black death, this is very far from the black death. 

And this is only in the US. The “Disaster” that’s Italy has killed ten thousand people, mostly very old.  The normal flu in Italy normally kills four or five times that.

Honestly, the only two conspiracy theories that make sense is that this is a psy-ops from deeply embedded greenies seeking to reduce the numbers of humanity, or that China is coordinating this with everyone in the US who works for China and is in their pay and is afraid of getting discovered. And I don’t even believe THAT because someone would break ranks/get scared/realize that they too are made of flesh and will die in this.

Because guys, the situation is dire. Yes, farmers are still planting. BUT THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN DISTRIBUTE FOOD EFFICIENTLY OTHER THAN THE FREE MARKET and we’re taking the mother of all hammers to the free market.

And trust me, trust me, please trust me on this: IF the wheels come off in the US the rest of the world is going to die screaming this winter.  And I don’t know if this bullshit of what amounts to five months in lock down hasn’t already done all the damage that guarantees that.

So…. What is going on, precisely?

At this point I feel like I’m living in 1984.  Is it really bad in NYC? Has to be, in spots, at least, because otherwise they’d fake bigger numbers, right? But then again, who the hell knows?

Here’s what I know: almost everyone I know in the medical profession is getting half-time work. Why? Well, because hospitals are empty having kicked out/postponed everything and everyone but the most dire cases. Most people I know in the medical profession is staring at empty hospitals and being told the onslaught is coming “soon.” And if you post about it on twitter — I read a thread where someone did, yesterday — you get screamed at that they hope you get intubated.

People are going out of their minds. I’m an introvert, and most of what’s driving me bonkers is seeing the powers casually assumed — and not challenged — by mayors and governors.  You know, I’m starting to wonder if an order went out to wear a tutu, would people do it?  BUT most human beings need some contact, and those people are TRULY losing their sh*t.  I saw a woman in vinyl gloves (the crazier ones are always in vinyl gloves. And do they realize that if they then touch things and their face, it’s just like their own skin, right?) go crazy in a Walmart parking lot because she dropped a bag of groceries. We’re talking epic toddler fit.  And she wasn’t alone.

And then there’s the even crazier compliance.  Yesterday I stepped back to get something from my cart at the grocery store, and the gentleman in line behind me stepped hastily back.  Because six feet. Even though the six feet make absolutely no sense, and only applies to AEROSOLIZED virus.  You don’t breathe aerosol. You don’t now, you never did.  Sure, if you’re coughing violently some particles in your breath might be NEAR aerosolized. But no, not really. Some people think there’s an aerosol effect from the force of flushing a toilet but even that is not quite it. THIS IS NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS.

From that paper, and yes, it’s Zero Hedge, but the paper is sane, except for believing China:

An author of a working paper from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University said, “The current scientific consensus is that most transmission via respiratory secretions happens in the form of large respiratory droplets … rather than small aerosols. Droplets, fortunately, are heavy enough that they don’t travel very far and instead fall from the air after traveling only a few feet.”

The media was put into a frenzy when the above authors released their study on COVID-19’s ability to survive in the air. The study did find the virus could survive in the air for a couple of hours; however, this study was designed as academic exercise rather than a real-world test. This study put COVID-19 into a spray bottle to “mist” it into the air. I don’t know anyone who coughs in mist form and it is unclear if the viral load was large enough to infect another individual As one doctor, who wants to remain anonymous, told me, “Corona doesn’t have wings”.

To summarize, China, Singapore, and South Korea’s containment efforts worked because community-based and airborne transmission aren’t common. The most common form of transmission is person-to-person or surface-based.

So, don’t kiss strangers and don’t lick public toilets, wash your hands and don’t touch your face until you have WORK.

What we’re doing? Yeah, what we’re doing is straight up crazy.

Has anyone else noticed that for a month now “next week it’s going to get bad?” and “The peak is two weeks away?”  DOES ANYONE ELSE REMEMBER or is everyone else getting memory wiped every day?

Has anyone else noticed that the homeless aren’t dying or even getting sick — as a bunch of us started pointing this out a bunch of stories started circulating about “This sick homeless man approached me and–”  But those are exactly like the stories of Woke Eight Year Olds who are so scared of Trump they threaten suicide. They’re not credible. Also see thing above about empty hospitals. Yes, the homeless DO use the ED. They’re frequent flyers. They’re not using it any more than normal, or credibly sick more than normal from everything I’ve seen.

In our empty cities, they congregate in job lots, visibly not getting any unhealthier than they already were.

And the excuses I get for this?  “Oh, they’re outside, the air takes the virus way.”
Uh uh. so why are deranged local governments closing public parks? And beaches?  On the excuse that people WHO DON’T BREATHE IN AEROSOL weren’t respecting the six foot distance rule.

It’s like “Brazil, and the other places in the world where people can’t self-isolate (they can’t. Have you looked at housing/densitity/etc.) they don’t seem to be dying in massive batch lots. How come?”  “Oh, the virus can’t survive in warm and humid environments.”  I’ve actually seen this in serious articles.

AND YET they’re quarantining putting Florida under house arrest. (Quarantine is when you isolate the sick. — and btw, WHY not do that instead? Or even the vulnerable, if we can’t test for all the sick? — When you put the healthy under house arrest, it’s called tyranny.)  Hot, humid. And Louisiana has a bad outbreak…. Does anyone know the climate in Louisiana?  Gee, it must be as cold and dry as Colorado.

AM I THE ONLY PERSON SEEING THE OBVIOUS IN YOUR FACE DANCING CONTRADICTIONS?  Sometimes in the same article.

And why are very few people tallying the COST in lives of what we’re doing? Do most people think money rains from heaven or something?

Because just chronic stress, either from fear of the virus or fear that we’re now living in 1984 and will never be let out is going to result in deaths: suicides, autoimmune episodes (YOU don’t want to know) heart disease and cancer are all going to take their toll.

So is hunger (if you think we can stay on lock down five months and distribution will be fine, you must be a Marxist. They never understand distribution. Which is fine because the father of lies Marxism also didn’t.)  Maybe famine won’t kill people in the US (I wouldn’t bet) but in the rest of the world, there will be massive deaths from famine.

And that’s without counting all the “minor” ailments that aren’t being seen or treated and which will turn out not to be minor.

Usually in this type of situation you can look at who benefits and figure out what is driving it.

Sure, the media benefits from captive audiences, which they haven’t enjoyed in a decade.  Greens are all happy because we’re “reducing carbon.” And local politicians are getting their fascist boots on and strutting around enjoying their power. Oh, and Nancy Pelosi got to gloat early on that this was the end of Western civilization

Is that it? Is this what it takes for our nation and culture to commit suicide? Gleefully? Is this all?

And again, do none of the people driving this realize that they too are human, and the destruction they’re wreaking will engulf them and destroy them and their lives as much as the rest of us?

How many more extensions of house arrest are we getting? At this point I’m not sure this makes any sense EVEN IF HIS WERE THE BLACK PLAGUE. The continued “fake quarantine” will destroy more than death on a massive scale. Because TANSTAAFL and people will die from this in droves within a year.  (Sure the deaths will be less visible. But hell, the deaths from Wu-Flu are practically nonexistent on a scale of “what the flu does every year”.)

So, what is going on here? Am I the only one screaming in the forest of fear?
WHO ARE ALL YOU ZOMBIES?

*Okay, late again, and I should explain: When Dan and I were very young, sometimes he got to work from home. It was really really rare, but his company had this “portable computer” that weighed maybe 50 lbs and was the size of a large suitcase.
When for some reason everyone else was on vacation (it was a very small company) and they didn’t want to keep the lights on in the office, they would let him bring the computer home.
What we found is that after 3 day of both of us working from home, we slowly rotated to an almost exclusively nocturnal schedule. We’d be up till 3 or 4 in the morning, then wake up closer to noon than dawn.  At the time — we were in our early twenties and childless — this annoyed us, as it was too late to grab fast food breakfast.
I thought that our bodies had just changed, and with the time with kids, when I used to get up sometimes before 5 to get some writing in before taking them to school, we were now conditioned so we were up at six, rain or shine.
I mean, most days we work from home, and 7 am we’re at our computers, doing our various duties.
Apparently though, this is while the rest of the world is also functioning and we might be called upon to meet the away-kid at lunch, and/or do our shopping early before the crowds, or whatever.  When the world loses its time-moorings, we go back to our preferred schedule. So we’re going to bed at 3 am and get up around 10 or eleven. I’m so sorry.
I’m also sorry I didn’t put up the chapter yesterday.  It was a rough day, but I think I’ve turned the corner on dealing with anger, and hopefully it will get better now. I have so much work to do. As, probably, do we all.  Build over, build under, build around and be not afraid. You got this. We all got this. I don’t know how or when we’ll come out of this, but when we do, come out strong. Do now what you need to do to do so – SAH
PS- For some reason I did not get the vignette challenge word, so. there will be a picture.*

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Mermaids’ Song.

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So Nicolas has heard — before, and after, he hears the song.

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*(Note this book does not have my associate’s link, because I’m not sure of the mechanics of a free book in the associate’s link.)

FROM MY FRIEND NITAY ARBEL, FOUR FREE BOOKS:  Stay-at-home reading promotion: all my ebooks free on Kindle, Wednesday March 25 through Sunday March 29.

A LOT OF MY FRIENDS ALSO HAVE A SALE STILL GOING AND SO DO I:  For your reading pleasure.

VIGNETTES

I didn’t get the word challenge, so look at the picture below and write me something fun.

I’ll have a Witch’s Daughter chapter for you later in the day.  Note the novel to date is now a new tab (I hope.)

Covid 19 and US Mortality by I. Ratel

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a statistician.  I’m not an epidemiologist, nor am I a medical doctor, or even a schmuck with an undergrad in biology.  My degrees are in Industrial Management and Automotive Technology.  I am a long term organ transplant recipient who has lived with being immunocompromised long enough to take interest in these subjects because disease activity has more potential impact on me than on the average person.
I’ve been watching CDC’s flu surveillance since last fall when there were rumors floating about of a nasty new flu bug in China.  That’s not that unusual, there seems to always be rumors of nasty new bugs in China.  According to the South China Post the first COVID-19 case in Hubei province China was found November 17.  Even that article states that patient zero may have been earlier than that.  This page on FlightRadar24.com shows the Wuhan Tianhe airport serves many domestic and international routes.  I contend that it is reasonable to believe that the SARS-COV-2 virus began circulating around the global population back in November and December, spreading not only across China, but to much of the world.

When considering that possibility patterns in CDC’s regular ILI (Influenza Like Illness) surveillance data become interesting.  I’ve taken their data, and applied my meager Excel skills to chart out some things that surprised me.  Going into this, I expected to see mortality rates somewhere bump.  Prior to January we weren’t looking for this virus.  We’ve only had useful testing capability for a few weeks now.  Given the information we have on disease progression, I assumed that there would be an upward trend in Pneumonia mortality as without looking for and testing for SARS-COV-2, victims should have been classified as deaths due to pneumonia.  So I charted it, with the last 6 years of data published by CDC.

CDC calls week 40 of a year the beginning of the flu season, so all my charts are set to begin in week 40 of one year and end in week 39 of the next, showing years as flu seasons.

There is the customary increase at week 1, I assume related to holiday festivities and travel.  However the 2019-2020 season shows week by week pneumonia mortality to be low compared to the last few years, which is not what I expected.  What I truly did not expect was the sharp decline over the last few weeks.

I next looked at all-cause mortality.  Perhaps COVID-19 deaths hadn’t been captured in the pneumonia data.  But surely something this virulent would show somewhere.  I was again, surprised.

We see here that all-cause mortality ran on the high side of normal until it started to drop at the beginning of 2020, and recently dropped significantly.  Again, no indication of this virus killing people beyond seasonal norms.

There is one other salient point that stands out in my sifting of data.  Healthcare visits for ILI. [Influenza Like Illness.]

Here we see that people in the US have been seeing their doctors for influenza like illness at higher levels than normal.  The recent upswing can be explained by the current panic, but prior to that?  Most likely it’s more people getting sick enough with respiratory infections to see the doctor.

There is a lot more data available from CDC.  I’ve ignored all the confirmed influenza data, because a lab confirmed influenza case is not a COVID-19 case.  I haven’t seen much else available that should show indicators of COVID-19 beyond what I’ve illustrated here.  These are inelegant numbers, just showing totals, not adjusted to rates per capita or anything else, it was just an attempt to see possible trends from a high level.

As to conclusions, there isn’t enough data for any concrete conclusion.  Looking at this logically, IF there have been COVID-19 cases in the US since December, it doesn’t appear to have been deadly enough to have been very noticeable.  Please note that I am NOT saying “this is just another flu.”  We know that it’s quite virulent in certain populations like me; likely several times more deadly than the “normal” respiratory bugs that circulate every winter.  All that I am stating is that by the data I see right now it is not causing excess mortality beyond seasonal norms when looked at in total with all causes of death.

There are a myriad of possibilities that can be examined over the next few weeks as we get more data, but I will leave the in depth analysis to people better suited to it than I am. As for me, I’m not taking precautions beyond what I already do every flu season.  I have my towel, and intend to follow the advice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide: “Don’t panic.”

[I was trying to add the author’s excel files for download by those who want to examine the data, but it simply will not let me. I will email them to anyone who pings me privately, but I’m going to put images below and hope they work. They MIGHT be too small or unclear to read. BTW the author and I had several “people who know better than us” look at the charts, and it remains a mystery.  No, we don’t know what’s going on. We know it makes no sense. – SAH]
US Flu season mortality 1 2013-2020

US Flu season mortality 3 2013-2020

US Flu season mortality 3 2013-2020