Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Month: February 2023
I was thinking today about China giving up on Zero Covid. They were responding to significant public protests. The CCP isn’t democratic by our standards, but they actually care a great deal about public opinion, especially “expressed” public opinion.
What’s embarrassing, however, is the failure to spend the two years Zero-Covid bought fixing infrastructure. We know, at this point, that ventilation, HEPA filtering and UV radiation work. (This is what the rich gave themselves at Davos, so don’t waste anyone’s time arguing.)
There was a time, basically in the Victorian era, where we rebuilt all of the water infrastructure because we had finally got it thru our thick skulls that disease spread thru water. We did it, and it made a huge difference.
I think particularly of China because no other major country even really tried. China had the time, and they have the industrial resources to do what is necessary (also, refit buildings with water traps, those little u-bends you see under your sink or by your toilet.) They’re the largest manufacturing nation in the world, and they had spare housing workers hanging around.
Clean the air flow in buildings. Even just putting a HEPA filter in a classroom, without any other changes, drops Covid massively.
Now, this is a symptom of a larger problem. We have known about climate change for decades. The science was clear and known to the educated public by the late 70s, before there was a huge push for climate denialism backed by big money. There were some obvious easy solutions that amounted to “change infrastructure to use less energy.” Every building in developed country could have been made to use vastly less energy, and since we had an unemployment crisis combined with an energy crisis, it would have been the obvious right thing to do. Instead we did demand restriction through wage suppression, which had the side-benefit of making the rich a lot richer.
It has remained the right thing to do for decades. AOC’s New Green Deal is just a version of what everyone with sense has known needed to be done. I put out a similar plan first in the early 2000s at BOPNews, but I was nowhere near the first.
This is just embarrassing. We know what’s wrong, we know how to do some of the major steps required to fix it and we don’t do anything. Zero Covid was, on top of that run incompetently (but China gets points for at least trying till they gave up.)
Embarrassing. I’m just embarrassed for our leadership, who are psychopathic morons, even the ones who sometimes try to do the right thing, and I’m embarrassed or humanity, given how human social dynamics lead to such terrible leadership, over and over. Periods with competent leadership are rare, those where the leadership is both competent and non-psychopathic rarer still (in the US, this period in the 20th century arguably only exists for the period where FDR was in charge, and was marred even then by the sad fact that he was racist, particularly against Japanese (ironically because he liked the Chinese.) Truman, despite his good reputation, was a disaster.)
But this is a human problem which has gone on for about eight thousand years, and maybe longer.
The entire shit-show is just embarrassing and pathetic.
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So, here we go:
UK
Booster jabs will no longer be available to healthy under-50s from February 12, with Brits having just 12 days to book a slot.Offers of first and second doses will also be withdrawn later this year. https://t.co/C0vX7riVyR
— Jess (@MeetJess) February 1, 2023
Now, I want to point out again, that at Davos, where the rich and powerful meet to decide the fate of the world, everyone has to be vaccinated, and has to be tested and if they aren’t or they test positive, their badges are deactivated.
In other words, the rich get vaccinated. Current vaccines are pretty shitty, because they haven’t been keeping up with the mutation speed, but they’re still better than nothing, and do reduce the seriousness of cases.
But that’s not really the point: the point is that for the rich the cost of vaccine (Modern is raising it from $26 to $110 to $130 in the US) is meaningless to our lords and masters: they don’t even notice $120: they spend more, much more, for lunch. But to ordinary people such a price can be the difference between eating or paying the rent. If it has to go, it goes.
One policy for the rich, who can afford bespoke medicine, and another for the plebes.
This is also terrible public health policy. While the vaccines don’t prevent spread, they do reduce viral load in infected individuals, and thus reduce the odds people around them will get infected. Mass vaccination (note that it is voluntary) is a good thing.
Leaving aside the whole “death” thing, there has been so much disabling due to Covid that the Bank of England, hardly touchy-feely compassionate sorts have noticed it with alarm, so even if you, like our lords and masters, are functionally a psychopath, this is going to continue to cause disaster in the economy.
But then labor shortages and supply chain problems have been used as an excuse to raise prices much higher than cost increases, so from the point of view of the ruling class, who is this their problem? They’re getting richer; they make sure the people around them are tested and vaccinated and most of them can work from home and even before Covid lived inside carefully vetted bubbles. And if they do get sick, they’ll get the best care, far better than you will.
So, really, Covid continues to be win-win-win for the ruling class and who cares if it’s a mass death, mass disabling event of the sheep they rule over?
WIN! From WIN to WIN. That’s what it’s like to be in the ruling class. Even a pandemic that kills millions is just another profit opportunity.
Too bad you aren’t a member.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.