The Masking of Cheboygan

 I don't think that a national lockdown would have been appropriate because the virus did not hit all states equally, at least in the beginning.  Last I head, South Dakota still hadn't experienced any significant effects or mandated any restrictions.  I suspect that, if Trump had ordered a national lockdown, both Uncle Ken and I would be on opposite sides of the issue than we are today.  It's like when we were in school, a behavior is only cool if one of the cool kids does it.

Mask compliance in Cheboygan was about 50% until Queen Gretchen issued her latest decree, and now it's 100%.  No store in town will let you in without a mask.  Our sheriff has said that, while he wouldn't directly enforce the mask rule, he would respond if a maskless person refused to leave after store personnel told them to.  I, who am generally anti-mask, have been compliant only because I don't want to cause any trouble for the store personnel.  I only have to wear a mask while shopping, those poor people have to wear one all day.  Maybe that's why it's so hard to find help nowadays, nobody wants to wear a stupid mask for a whole eight hour shift.  

Most of the rural counties in Northern Michigan have been doing contact tracing since the beginning, while the urban counties Down Below complained that they didn't have the resources to do it.  

I have not heard of any large gatherings around here, but I have read about the house parties and street parties in the cities, many of which end up with somebody getting shot.  Shoppers have become generally compliant with the six foot rule, although it's not unusual for some body to wave you on if they see you waiting for them to clear the aisle.  I figure it's not so dangerous if you hustle by them really fast.

I see on the news that the anti-protestors are finally starting to fight back.  I don't remember seeing anything like that in the 60s, but I didn't watch much TV in those days, and I wouldn't have attended a protest if Jesus Christ Himself was leading it, and still wouldn't even unto this day.

The politicians I was thinking of were not the ant-war liberals, I was thinking of RINOS like Tricky Dick and Kissinger-ass, who snatched defeat out of the jaws on victory in Vietnam.  Then there was Truman, who fired MacArthur for trying to win in Korea.  

Lockdown works

 About half the states never put on lockdowns until like a month ago.  As some fb wags have said this was like having a peeing and a no peeing section of the swimming pool. If we had had a real president we would have had a nation wide lockdown not that ineffective state by state with many states doing nothing rubbish.  Yes, that is what I have been stating all along.  Obviously if we had a nation wide lockdown at the beginning, we would be doing much better than we are doing now.  

Testing is increasing but it is nowhere near what it should be to effectively fight the corona.

Maybe it was a month ago that I said that the corona would be spreading to rural areas.  From what has been related a lot of people in Cheboygan have not been wearing their masks when going into the Walmarts and even people working there have not been wearing masks.and even after Gutsy Gretchen mandated mask wearing I'll bet there are a lot of people still not wearing them.  In downtown Chicago roughly two thirds of the people in the street are masked and in the stores everybody is.  I hear from my friends in the burbs that masks are rarer and they all have higher rates than the city itself.

States like Arizona, Texas, and Florida that had huge rates not that long ago have seen their rates go down once they started mandating masks.  Other states like California who had locked down early were doing well, but then they started opening up and they have seen their rates soar.  

Faucci never said that if we wore masks for two weeks that it would knock the corona out, just that it would reduce fatalities by the tens of thousands, and if we had way more testing than we have now we could do a lot of contact tracing which we are hardly doing now, we could put out hot spots as they occurred and this would bring it way down, though it will probably never go away completely.  

And there is a lot more to locking down than masks, it includes social distancing and no large gatherings like we are seeing in the news every day, not least among the Trumpists.  

Fauci said that masking would be effective if ninety percent of the people masked, a number which we are nowhere near.  It is one thing to mandate masking, but if people ignore it it doesn't mean a thing.

When Beagles speaks of politicians not letting us win wars, I think he is speaking of anti war politicians.  There have been just as many or pro war politicians who got us into stupid wars which the voters of the United States grew tired of and voted against, and that's what got us out of those quagmires.

As for the darkling plain we now have a Trumpist killed in Portland.  Both sides will likely be arming themselves now.  No good can come of that.

I Don't Understand

If three months of lockdown failed to stop the virus, what makes you think that two more weeks would do it?  Are you saying that the original lockdown should have been extended for two more weeks, or are you saying that a new two week lockdown should be imposed starting now?  Or maybe you mean that, if Trump had imposed a nation wide two week lockdown in the beginning, this thing would have been all over with by now?

I understand that testing was pretty sparse in the beginning but, last I heard, there was a lot more testing going on now, which is one reason, but not the only reason, the case numbers have spiked.  About a month ago, they had tested over a thousand people in Cheboygan County, and all they could come up with was 21 cases.  This number had held steady for over a month when all the stores in Cheboygan started enforcing the mask rule by order of Queen Gretchen.  Since then our case number has tripled, in spite of  Dr. Fauci's assurance that we could knock the virus down in two or three weeks if everybody would start wearing masks in public.  This doesn't prove that the masks made the virus worse, but it seems to indicate that they certainly didn't make it any better.   

I think the reason our military hasn't won a war in our lifetimes is that the politicians won't let them.  Maybe we should take some money away from the politicians and give it to the military.  

solutions

 Kind of silly to abandon a process that helps the situation just because it doesn't completely shut it down.  What we should have done, and can still do, but most likely won't, is to have a complete tough lockdown for like two weeks, so that anybody that was infected would not be able to pass it on, and when we emerged it would be gone.  Well not exactly, you couldn't totally shut down, and people would cheat, but it could take it way down, and if you had a good testing program you could stomp out the resultant little fires.  But you would have to have the country working together and certainly having a lying sack o shit for prez makes the whole thing impossible.  

It would cost a lot of money and would be a pain in the ass, but not as much money and not as much of a pain in the ass as the current situation.

That's the situation with cops not wearing body cams, the mayor of Kenosha thought it was too expensive and the cops thought it was too much of a pain in the ass. but you have to admit it would be much cheaper and less of a pain in the ass than the current situation there.

Even if cops were punishable for their misdeeds and were not inclined to cover up for their bad apples, there would still be times when they wrongly killed a black man, but it would not be as often.  From conversations with I have had most people previous to blm were not as aware of the provisions in police contracts that lets them skate, but now they are and there were polls that most people looked favorably on blm.  Now that they have failed to separate themselves from looters I think they may well have sacrificed that approval.  

And in the Try Something Else mode I would like to suggest that we have been showering the military with money since I was born, and they have not won a war in all that time.  All that dough would help us greatly in the time of pandemic.

Try Something Else

 Just as the lockdown did not stop the corona virus, the protests and riots have not stopped the police shootings.  The lockdown did appear to have a dampening effect on the virus while it was in force, but the virus surged back as soon as the lockdown was partially lifted.  The easy answer is to keep the lockdown in force forever, but you can't shut down the economy forever, so that's not going to happen.  The latest issue of National Geographic has an article about the 1918 flu epidemic.  It shows that the cities that locked down did indeed flatten their virus curves rather quickly, within a few months, but the virus didn't come roaring back after those lockdowns were lifted.  Our current virus appears to be a different animal.  

Meanwhile, the cops are still shooting Black people as our cities continue to burn.  While I can understand the frustration that drives the protests and riots, I don't understand how they can keep doing the same thing over and over again when it's obviously not working.  They can't conduct protests and riots every weekend forever.  Either they will run out of things to burn or the coming winter will dampen their enthusiasm.  The Detroit Riot of 1967 only lasted five days, but the city never did recover from it.  People and businesses moved out and Detroit remains a mere shadow of its former self even unto this day.  

Remember the other day when I said I wish that Blogger offered a different type size between normal and large?  Well they do now, it's called "medium".  Try it, you'll like it.

darkling plain

 Remembered the last three lines of this Mathew Arnold poem watching the news today.  Cops with no body cams shoot this guy in Kenosha and then there are demonstrations that lead to the darker forces tearing up the town and then a teenage Trumpist as part of a militia guns down two of them.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

the wagon train to Bendrooms

Bringing bottles back to Connie's, (which for reasons I have never known we called Ben Drooms, or was it Bendrooms, was it named after a person or was it just a word or what?) was one of my fondest memories.  The guys next door, the O'Days, were maybe five years older than us and they were into cars and spent a lot of time in their garage working on them and drinking lots and lots of pop, but the deposit on the bottles was chump change to them and they were glad to give them to us just to get rid of them.  We formed a wagon train in the alley. two cent, and five cent bottles jostling to the bumps in the unpaved alley, down to 57th Street and then across Christiana and into Bendrooms.  They were not all that happy to see us.  "Did you buy all these here?" they would ask suspiciously, but they knew we would be spending it all back over the candy counter so they rang them all up.

Years later in southern Illinois we would buy a case of Cooks beer for $2.80 a case with 85 cents deposit, and when we drank it all we would take the empties back along with fifty cents and buy a quart of something called Vino Fino which put a nice nightcap on the evening.

It doesn't happen here anymore.  I guess back when it made economic sense, bottles were expensive and it made it a more attractive buy if you could get two cents of your purchase back.  Ecology was not a concern back in those days.  Actually with cans it makes economic sense because the metal in the can is worth something,.  In Austin there were a lot of bums who were constantly searching for empty cans and if you were a thoughtful citizen you would save your cans and when you saw a bum on the street scrounging you would offer him a bag of them.  

A lot of the reason states do that deposit thing is not financial but ecological, just to keep the crap from littering the roads.  It seems like the right thing to do and I am ashamed that my home true blue state doesn't do it while Beagles's dubious purple state does.

It's a minor thing I suppose but what sticks in my craw at the supermarket is those people who have been waiting in line ahead of you and only when the clerk is done ringing them up does it occur to them to look through their pockets or their purses or whatever to find out where their money or card is.  Did they think they were going to get their food for free?

Speaking of the end is near there are those hellish fires in California, and those two hurricanes, one of which is making landfall as I write, AND. there is now a meteor with a .41 percent chance of hitting the earth on the day before election day.  It is only 6 feet across so it won't be eliminating any species, but it could well knock you on the noggin,

I'm surprised to see Yang, a guy I rather admire on that poster of lunatics.  I don't know who those military guys are but one look at 'Jocko' assures me that they will not be getting my vote.  

I expected wild and wacky things from the rep convention, but it's kind of like those chair throwing shows, it gets old fast.  After two nights of watching it between innings I am giving it up.