A Snowball's Chance

First of all, credit where it's due. The weather forecasters for Detroit and environs were quite right that temperatures were going fall fast, and to dangerous levels of cold. They appear to be correct about the high winds making it feel colder that it is. A tip of the hat is proper. Yet we will get nowhere near the amount of snow that was being predicted as recently as, oh, twelve hours before I hammered this missive out. Christmas Snowmageddon 2022 will not happen. 

I'm not saying that conditions aren't serious. I'm not saying that we shouldn't take rational precautions. But I am saying the whole thing is just like COVID: 'we're all gonna die if we don't isolate at home' seems to be the basic, go-to response of government experts.

I mean, who ultimately drives weather forecasts? The National Weather Service. A government agency. Who drove the COVID scare? The National Institutes of Health. A government agency. Who needs to justify their jobs to keep them? Government bureaucrats. How do they keep their jobs? By instilling fear in the citizenry, for one thing.

They're going to succeed in the exact opposite of the best response if they're not careful. People not unlike me will see it as crying wolf, and won't believe them when an actual predatory animal nears until it really is too late.

An Ill Wind Blows

Let's shut down the media and the government for two weeks and see how quickly this crisis passes.

-Me, two years ago on Facebook

I said it at the time and I fully meant it. This was right at the start of the COVID panic, and I meant it as a slam on government, the media, and all too many regular citizens. We needed to calm down and take a breath in confronting the COVID threat.

We did not do that. Instead, we shut things down. We destroyed lives and livelihoods simply because we were scared. We stopped caring about human rights essentially because of raw, unfiltered fear.  We allowed irrationality to rule our thoughts.

That set the precedent that the government has the right to shut us up in our homes if it and only it deems the act necessary. This same government which is currently setting up a board of disinformation to determine what is wrong and what is right. 

Anybody but me feel a chill lately?

Joe's No

For as cantankerous as he could be, there were many axioms of me Grandpa Joe's which were rather profound in their own right. One was that, almost always, if you had to have an answer right now, this very moment, the answer is no.

I believe that part of the point was that he, personally, wasn't going to be rushed into anything. If Joe Cosgriff was going to do something it would be on his time and his way. Never mind, God love him, that when he wanted his way he didn't mind putting the rush on you. But to be fair, that typically involved work issues around the Shop. It was his Shop, so his rules. I get that; I even have a certain respect for it.

Yet beyond either of those points, there's something to be said for never (or almost never) being pressured into making a choice. It invites rash, unreflective thought processes. Yes, sometimes a decision must be made now, whenever there's a true emergency situation. We simply must do the best we can in such circumstances. Still, be honest: how often are we really facing that type of case?

Rushing into decisions is precisely what gets us into trouble. I will, yes, I will, use the recent COVID hysteria as an example. We were pressed into accepting extreme rules and extreme revisions in our lives, both personal and business. Panic overruled a rational thought process, and panic rarely affords us wise decision making. But something had to be done now, dammit.

What are we today because of that attitude? We have ruined lives, ruined businesses, and ruined friendships even. I know I've been unfriended by several on Facebook because of COVID rendering calm, clear thought into the abyss. And where are we at? Exactly where cooler heads way back in early 2020 when this all began predicted we would be: in a world where nothing we did had any actual affect on the virus or its spread. In a world where the virus was never so bad as the presumed experts within the scientific governmental complex insisted we would be. We aren't dying in record numbers. If we had, en masse, said no, we won't do it, we'd have avoided all sorts of calamity.

If someone has to have a decision now the answer should be no. Me Grandpa Joe said so, and I'm with him. 

My Left Foot

Everything was going well. My doctor had the order for my foot X-rays ready when I arrived at his office. There was no one in front of me at the X-ray station at the hospital next door. Yesterday was proceeding rather smoothly indeed.

Then I had to get the actual X-rays.

I did not know that my foot could get into the positions the technician put it into. Neither did the rest of me. As I sat up on the table and he twisted my left foot outward, a complete chain reaction was caused along my entire body. I had to turn myself against my left hip, stretch my leg out, and hold my torso up with my hands behind my back (otherwise he would not have gotten the right angle). It was as if I were playing solo Twister while gamma rays were being fired into my body. 

"Hold perfectly still," the technician told me sternly.

I laugh. Ha, ha! Surely you jest.

That's when I got the Mr. Spock raised eyebrow. The X-ray tech did not, in fact, jest.

Fortunately that was the worst of the five X-rays taken, although the other four had their own special levels of discomfort. I appreciated getting that first one out of the way though. 

The damn thing is that through all the twisting and turning and hold still-ing, my ankle didn't hurt at all. Not one bit. I could hardly walk on Thursday (which prompted my call to the doctor who ordered the X-rays). Foot pain has been an issue for me off and on for at least a year, foot and ankle pain so bad I could barely hobble around at times. But as it's becoming more on than off, it was high time to do something about it, right? Yet I had no pain at all while enduring the procedures. I walked out of the hospital just fine after hobbling in. 

Of course, when I stepped out of my new old van on returning home, I nearly went down in a heap. So it goes.

My doctor will have the X-rays Tuesday, so hopefully I'll have reasonably good news then. I fully expect the diagnosis to be COVID though.

Sorry. I couldn't resist that.

A Sermon (though not on Religion)

One of the arguments made across the political and national spectrums in favor of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports is easily summed up as, the government makes us do other things, so why not those?

This is an intellectually dishonest argument; it is simplistic and ignores a great many things. To begin with, an awful lot of the things government compels us to do are in fact morally wrong. We can debate about the specifics, but suffice it to say (and I believe that in their hearts even my liberal and progressive friends would agree) that there are areas where existing government intrusion into our lives is wrong. Or are there actually folks out there willing to argue that an act or idea is right merely because a government thinks so? Let's hope not.

Yes, there are times and places where government does in fact have the right to cajole individuals into acting certain ways and in certain manners. But as a practical matter governments cannot dictate every move we make (though they may try). If government were to attempt to really make us do right rather than wrong in every conceivable instance (if we could actually conceive of every instance) I assure you that the amount of new regulations necessary would make the current tax code read like a children's book. The ifs, ands, and wherefores would require that much analysis. And they would still be incomplete.

Yet governments must act against the truly awful things which may occur in the world. I have to believe that, as a matter of right reason, there are guides and standards which we can appeal to in determining where and why they can act. Indeed anyone who argues for any public act at all must, in their hearts, believe this too. Aquinas taught that as government can't see to everything, it should only prohibit (or by logical argument encourage) only those things so vile and debased (or so good and and laudable) that without whose prohibition (or sanction) civil society could not exist. 

The question then becomes, is COVID so great a threat that it requires massive government intrusion into our lives?

Emphatically, no.

Vaxing question redux

I addressed the question of mandatory vaccination for COVID and the potential for vaccine passports the other day. You can read about here if you like:

https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2021/09/vaxing-question.html

It should not surprise anyone who knows me to discover I am against such ideas. But I want to take a moment to look at things a bit further. It was brought on when I read that uber-libertarian Howard Stern asserted that anti-vaxxers should not get health care if they fall ill with COVID. I think such cavalier, indeed reprehensible, attitudes express precisely why we as a society should be very careful about telling people what they can and cannot do.

If someone is denied health care because they didn't get the COVID vaccine on the mere grounds that they made an individual choice as a reflection of their personal freedom (no matter how insidious you might think that choice to be) then I must ask, what else may society deny a person who is acting in ways arguably harmful to the greater society?

Should someone who overeats not receive care? Someone who smokes like a chimney? Someone who drinks too much? Someone who races their car at 100 miles per hour on the highway and crashes horrifically? Surely such folks could or will cost society quite a bit in the long run. Arguably they care no more for their fellow man than the person who will not be vaccinated, if you believe that the anti-vaxxer has no concern for his peers. Indeed if we ever reach the point in the States where there are national health plans on a broader scale than we have it currently, there is a simple and easy to emplace rationale for denying health care: society is paying for it, so society has a right to dictate who gets it. Why? Because your actions can, quite obviously, adversely affect society.

Think that can't happen? Two years ago I never imagined so many freedoms being trampled on for an illness which is, I will say it again because I believe it needs to be shouted from the rooftops, relatively harmless. If it's justified for and accepted for COVID, it's more easily and readily justified for most other human actions. We would then, as Ben Franklin so rightly warned us, have given up freedom for security and will end up with neither. It is a trade we should not make.

Vaxing question

I almost hate to step into what has become a quagmire. Yet, truth be told, so very much of what we face in this world is a marshland. Unless we wish to never express an opinion at all we cannot help but step in a swamp.

To vax or not to vax, that is the question. At least, it's the question dragging down a lot of civil conversation these days. I don't pretend to know the One Best Answer. But I am honest enough to admit it. Too many of my friends apparently walk on a plane of knowledge which I am not certain, by any measure, exists on this issue.

Talk of vaccine mandates are, quite honestly, obscene. The defense that the government makes us do all sorts of things so why not that fails to address the point. Quite bluntly, there are a great many things which government already compels us to do which it should not. That a government might try to compel us to act has no bearing on the morality of the act. 

Still, I will concede that a legitimate government has the moral authority under the right circumstances to force us to do given things. We couldn't have a single law without recognizing as much. So I will allow that even with vaccines those in authority over us might be within their rights to make us vaccinate. Again, without allowing for that we could not morally tolerate the vaccinations forced upon our children. The question then becomes, does the government have the moral authority to do that with COVID vaccines, or, worse, issue so-called vaccine passports?

I must come down on the side of the anti-vaxxers on that. With all due respect to those who will disagree with me, it is rather plain by any reasonable analysis that those who contract the disease by any means will almost certainly survive it. Then we have the fact that the governments don't actually seem to have a handle on it (masks work unless they don't; social distancing may or may not matter; you can live normally with two shots until you need a third; where does it end?) which leads to the legitimate question of whether we can trust government on COVID. And there is a difference, a huge difference, between vaccines being rushed through and the extensive, years long development of those against evils such as polio.

Part of the reason I'm okay with mandated vaccines against polio and measles and so on is that they are well established. It's pretty clear that we don't know all the effects of the COVID vaccines precisely because they're so new. There simply hasn't been enough time to have any real and final idea about their long term use and impact. Men and women are within their rights to be skeptical of them on that basis alone.

As a rule of thumb, acting without adequate knowledge is foolish. You get things such as health care advocates bobbing back and forth on issues exactly because the situation is still in flux. This leads to the rash, knee jerk actions which governments are so good at doing. If you don't mind a bit of a pun, governments (and their media hounds) need to take a pill and calm down. So do we.

Systemic Government

Simply to cut to the chase on this issue, I'm not half so worried about climate change as I am what ours and many other governments might do under its banner. I know that a bright red flag is being waived; we gotta do something now!

The hell we do, quite frankly, especially in light of the fact that virtually everything which comes out of the government and the media are crises. This has nearly always been the case: globalcoolingwarmingclimate panics have been around for decades now. And this is only one example. The entire COVID debacle is another: a crisis was created and then spectacularly mishandled. We're supposed to trust government after that?

Why should we believe for a New York minute that a government (and, I stress, a media) which causes so many problems will magically be the solution this time around? It's hubris, friends, a supreme and self inflating arrogance to think as much. I mean, if we are to believe (I do not, but for the sake of argument) in such a thing as systemic racism, from whence does it come? Government, plain and simple. So the supposed system which oppresses you currently (again, only for argument sake) will not oppress you further if given tyrannically greater power? 

The argument answers itself. But will it, can it in some quarters, be heard?

Cology

Me Grandpa Joe used to talk about the Cology. It was his colloquial shorthand for psychology. What he meant, as near as I could tell anyway, was that sometimes we let our own thoughts get in our own way.

He's right you know. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies, when we're overthinking or allowing fears to burden us. Right now my own cology is affecting me in a different manner.

I had my first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine late yesterday. Now I'm dealing, perhaps a little too intently, with concerns about side effects. Is my left arm actually sore or am I just concentrated on it because that's where I got the shot? Am I vaguely nauseous because of the medicine or because of the bacon double cheeseburger I ate on the way home? Am I fatigued due to Pfizer or is it simply that I didn't get to sleep until nearly 11 and popped awake at 3:30 this morning?

I think it's the cology. But it gave me something to write about today.

COVID vaccine redux

I had an appointment this morning at 10:03 for my first dose of the COVID vaccine. But I cancelled it. This decision was made not out of stubbornness, a recant of my earlier resolve to get the shot. Yet it has all the markings of being all about Marty just the same.

My wife sent me a text yesterday that the Detroit Tigers along with Meijer and McClaren Health Services are opening a 'pop up' vaccine site before the next six Tigers home games. Anyone getting the vaccine there will be given two vouchers which can be exchanged for tickets to that day's or a future ballgame. 

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Everyone will also get a Meijer $10 gift card. 

So you know what? I cancelled the earlier appointment and booked one for Comerica Park later today at 4:30. Because hey, I might as well get something for my efforts.

I tell you, it pays to procrastinate. At least sometimes.

If it kills me I will haunt you

Well, I did it. I made the commitment. I wasn't going to; I was going to be thoroughly bull headed and not be bullied (yes, I mean bullied, and in the worst, most repugnant sense of the word) into it. But I have an appointment for my first dose of the COVID vaccine for June 8 at ten o'clock in the morning.

People, and by people I mean society, and by society I mean all too many of you out there, play on fears. You have successfully played on mine. I don't want others to get ill because of me. Further, I do recognize the very valid argument that I should not allow pig headed spite to influence what may arguably be a rational decision. Yet I still don't believe for a moment that COVID was, is, or ever will be a serious threat to me or my family and friends. It posed the greatest threat to a small and well defined segment of the population, a segment we could have and should have easily kept protected.  Shame on you, governors Whitmer and Cuomo, for what you did with the nursing homes: you caused more death directly and immediately with COVID that I ever will or would have, all the while you sons of...mothers deigned to lecture the rest of us on responsibility. The threat to the general population was tiny, and almost certainly would have been taken care of through herd immunity. 

Yet we had to destroy a robust economy, kill numerous small businesses, cause many deaths unrelated to COVID which could have been prevented had we not panicked and made people afraid to seek needed health care for other issues, and affect an election outcome because of it. I don't give a flying...leap what you think of Donald Trump or how happy you might be that he's no longer President. You need to ask yourself: do we want elections profoundly affected by sheer and unwarranted panic? We should not.

I haven't even asked what ought to be the obvious question: now that the government (our servants, mind you, not our leaders) has seen how easily we may be cowed, how much more quickly and over how little else might they try to lock us down again? Believe me, they will try when they feel the right pretense exists. Because after all, they got away with it before. It will harder to keep them from trying it again.

So I will kowtow, I will genuflect before your almighty and self defined omnipotent will, powers that be. I will get my shots. And if I may sign off as the curmudgeon I fully mean to be here, You're Welcome.

Doctors in government are politicians

A year ago Tuesday I posted a social media update which said: 'Let's cancel the media and the government for two weeks and see how long this crisis lasts'. It was in response to what were then the new two week lockdowns to stop the spread of COVID. Oh Facebook, you do know how to dredge up memories.

It caused a stir; there were more than 40 comments to the thread. That's okay. I expected comment or I wouldn't have posted. Most of the comments were against me, and that's okay too. You don't have to agree with me to be friends on my end. 

Anyway, I read through the thread. Among the comments one person opined, "I'd rather trust the doctors than the politicians." All right, if that's what you like. Yet I think you forget that doctors in bureaucracies, that is, doctors in government, are politicians.  They work in bureaucracies which by their natures have agendas which are political: to protect their turf and influence. 

Fauci and the myriad civil servants who began offering 'advice' (knowing such would become orders) without much consideration of what they knew and did not, could not know at the time, are politicians. They had to act, they had to do something, even with far from complete information, because that's what politicians do in crisis. They act. So they acted, harshly and (I will say it) inhumanely toward their fellow man, destroying lives and businesses in the process. The still ongoing process, at least in Democrat held states and a few Republican.

But at least the speaker displayed proper distrust of politicians, I'll give them that. They simply didn't consider all whom were politicians.

We need to develop a healthier distrust of government, which is of course run by, I must stress, politicians, even should they hold medical credentials. Because most anyone, once having become a public servant, can't seem to help bring out the whips and chains. To protect us, of course.