Month: May 2020

A friend harvested this from a (helicopter?) mom’s discussion group:

I want to vent but don’t want blow back. Our 18 year old who works 6-7 hours a week filed for unemployment benefits and then filed for the additional federal benefit of $600 a month,unbeknownst to us. She has received 1950 so far and spent 1200 already on clothes etc over 800 today alone. We found out about this earlier tonight. We are horrified and ashamed and at a loss. No federal money should ever have come her way. She’s a full time student and a dependent completely cared for. She made at most $2600 a year and she’s receiving the salary if someone who makes 40k a year at least (her benefits aren’t taxed). Right now we are deciding what to do. You can’t give the money back. By the time it’s over she will have received $8000!!!!! What do i do? We are contemplating have her give it to the charity of her choice. She is not loving that idea. I’m disgusted and just want her out of the house. I’m resisting that impulse but it’s a strong one

Personally, I think the soon-to-be-well-clothed gal is entitled to the money (but, unless she heads to the South, where can she go and wear her new clothing?). Before this started, she took the initiative to get a W-2 job, even if only one day per week. Despite her near-zero personal risk of dying from Covid-19, she has lost what used to be her Constitutional freedoms, e.g., of assembly. Unless she chooses a career of harvesting tax-free child support cash from a portfolio of married dermatologists, dentists, and radiologists, she will be paying for all of the costs of coronapanic via higher tax rates for her entire working life (the shutdown was sold as an attempt to protect Boomers, but the shutdown is being paid for with bonds whose interest payments will fall due mostly after Boomers are long-retired and/or dead).

A journalist friend posted on Facebook asking how people greet each other in the mask age.

Her friend:

I greet someone who is wearing a mask this way “GOOD MORNING, thanks for wearing your mask.. oh by the way, I am smiling” To the people that aren’t wearing one I turn my back and walk away.. I’ve started saying “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?”

Me:

I like to scold unmasked teenagers here in our suburb who are having fun on skateboards and scooters on the road near our house. I remind them that their personal risk of dying of Covid-19 is at least as high as their chance of being struck by debris from the International Space Station and therefore I expect them to be diligent in mask-wearing.

“Get off my lawn!” has become “Stop breathing into my air!”

“DESPITE ONE OF WORST CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAKS IN EUROPE, BELARUS REFUSES TO CANCEL MILITARY PARADE” (Newsweek, May 6):

Belarus will continue to hold its annual military parade this week, despite experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe.

According to a tracker provided by Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday, Belarus had 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus and at least 103 deaths.

103 deaths? In a country of 9.5 million, that’s “one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe”? Wouldn’t Belgium, with 8,000 deaths out of a population of 11.5 million, be a better candidate for “worst”? Or Switzerland, with nearly 1,500 deaths and a population of 8.6 million?

What could account for the journalist and editors at Newsweek describing Belarus as a Covid-19 disaster area?

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted countries across the world, Belarus has remained one of the only European nations to not impose a lockdown, to fight the spread of the virus.

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/21/infidels-in-sweden-are-refusing-to-die/

“Greta Thunberg to UN: ‘You’ve stolen my childhood with your empty words'” (DW, September 23, 2019):

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” a visibly angry Thunberg told the high-level audience gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” thundered the 16-year-old Swedish girl, who has galvanized youth across the world to mobilize against climate change.

This was a debatable point at the time, but just six months later children around the world were cut off from their playgrounds, their friends, and their schools (i.e., most of their “childhood”)! Bizarrely, one of the only countries where this did not happen is Sweden, home of infidels who reject the True Church of Shutdown.

So… Greta Thunberg might turn out to be wrong regarding atmospheric physics, just as the academic researchers who’ve gotten grants for climate modeling may turn out to be wrong (Cato article on a paywalled Nature paper). But I think she got the generational dynamics correct! Given the chance to cut their personal risk of contracting Covid-19 by a percentage point or two, older adults had no difficulty deciding to rob children of their childhood. (And when coronapanic is over, it will be time to for Boomers to go shopping for a new pavement-melting SUV!)

Readers: What’s your best guess as to when children get their childhood back? Folks here in thoroughly plagued Massachusetts are saying that they do not expect schools to reopen in September. The general public will demand protection from child-to-child spreading, even if there are few examples of this documented by the countries that are good at contact tracing. Teacher unions will seek to keep the 100% pay/5% hours/0% commute system that is currently working for them. Children will not get a vote. New York City is saying “50/50” on whether they reopen.

Related:

• NYT on Denmark’s April reopening of schools: “instead of arriving through a single entrance, pupils must enter through several side doors, depending on the location of their classroom.” (here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the school that is about to be torn down and rebuilt ($110 million for 440 town-resident kids) actually has a door from every classroom to the outside; this was eliminated in the new design on the grounds that it would make the school a more defensible fortress against an armed attacker (if the students couldn’t get out except through a central hallway?), so the new school building, in addition to having a lot less fresh air (“Net Zero”) won’t be as ready for plague times)
• “Greta Thunberg is donating $100,000 to help children affected by coronavirus pandemic” (CNN)
• the Swiss health ministers say that “scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus” and therefore they’re reopening schools; righteous American climate change #resisters will say “the science isn’t settled” on this one? (BBC)
• “Should schools reopen? Kids’ role in pandemic still a mystery” (Science, May 4, 2020) (but there is no mystery to the paychecks that keep arriving in adult teachers’ and school administrators’ mailboxes!)

Amazon has an advertising affiliate program. There is an easy way to get deplatformed that is highlighted in red at the top of the page:

As a reminder, we ask all of our associates to exercise good judgment when covering COVID-19 and refer readers to the CDC website for accurate information. For more information, see the FTC’s guidance around Coronavirus claims. As a reminder, advertising with unsubstantiated claims is a violation of law and a violation of the Operating Agreement and may result in account closure, including withholding fees.

Here’s a partial screen shot:

Soo… you can disagree with the official CDC line (which one though? “Don’t wear a mask” or “wear a mask”?), but your ad-supported web site will become a charity project.

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/02/youtube-casting-out-the-physician-heretics/

We don’t get too much news about our southern neighbor. Given that it is Cinco de Mayo, however, can we ask how Mexico is faring? The charts at ft.com suggest that the country’s experience of coronaplague is fairly typical. Yesterday’s WHO report shows that Mexico, with 2,061 deaths, is substantially less plagued than Canada or the U.S. and that emigrating from Spain to Mexico would have been a smart move, from a Covid-19 perspective.

How about the economy? It is tough to imagine that tourism and oil are doing well. With the U.S. economy in shambles, can the manufacturing plants near the border be prospering? Americans are stuffing themselves like pigs, so maybe Mexican agriculture is thriving?

Related:

• “As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants” (NYT) says that Mexicans no longer have to play host to half of the world’s asylum-seekers (instead of “fleeing violence” in their home countries, they are now returning home to the violence about which they were prepared to spin a tale on arriving for processing by the American refugee industrial complex)