“CDC Ramps Up Research on Highly Contagious Variant from India”: https://bloom.bg/348lYs6

The ignorant pay the price.

“Lauren Boebert stated there hadn’t been a single COVID-19 death in Texas since mask restrictions ended in March. Data shows thousands had, in fact, died.”: https://yhoo.it/3fVATvt

The joke is on them, all the ignorant yahoos who believe the government is the enemy and you can make up all the facts you want. Their lack of knowledge, their refusal to face facts, just might kill them, if they are not dead already.

I’m addicted to the news. They call it the information age, and there’s so much information out there it’s staggering. If you want to know what is going on, you can. You’ll probably know more than those in Congress if you have the will to read and pay attention. Or, you could be all about lifestyle, tune out the news and be out of the loop, to your detriment.

I subscribe to the Apple News. You probably don’t. It’s ten bucks a month. My inbox is filled with people who refuse to pay…for cable, for Netflix, for the news. They think they’re superior when the truth is they’re just cheap. Sure, some people can’t afford these outlets, but most just have other priorities…I mean how much does that alcohol cost you a month, that cannabis that’s now legal is uber-expensive. Then again, if you didn’t work hard in high school you probably never got into a good college and there’s a good chance you didn’t graduate anyway, but the only person who is paying the price is you.

Yes, personal responsibility, the right has been arguing for it for eons. And now the age is upon us.

Being a baby boomer, people talk to me all the time about taking social security. They think it’s their money, they’re afraid of not getting it back, so they take it early, to their extreme detriment.

“The Biggest Mistakes People Make With Social Security – One of the most common and costly: worrying about dying too soon”: https://on.wsj.com/3vskOUc

That’s behind a paywall so unless you’re a subscriber to the “Wall Street Journal” you can’t read it, but if you did it would pay off in spades, preparing you for the life of retirement.

Here’s the blue chip quote:

“Social Security is longevity insurance, he (Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff) says. That is, it offers protection against running out of money as we age. People don’t do break-even calculations when they buy home insurance, because they are protecting themselves against a catastrophic event like a fire. They shouldn’t do them with Social Security either, he says.”

But I’ve never ever heard anybody say this in real life. They’re all doing the math, making sure they don’t end up on the losing side, dying before they break even. Yes, they could wait until 70 to take Social Security and die in five years and have been better off taking it years earlier, but it’s not about income, as stated above, IT’S ABOUT NOT RUNNING OUT OF CASH! Sure, you could die at 75, but let’s say you live to 95, are you gonna have enough money left? I know two couples, family friends, who did not. They outlived their money. Thank god they had children with extra, otherwise they’d have been SOL.

But people don’t go to authorities when they make decisions, they listen to the scuttlebutt, they ask their friends, and way too often their friends are just plain wrong.

So if you read the above Bloomberg article, you’ll find that the Indian variant is thought to be 50% more transmissible than the U.K. variant, which shut down the U.K. and infected people in the U.S. And the problem is, not enough people are vaccinated. Trials have shown that the Pfizer and Astra Zeneca vaccines protect against the Indian variant, but Idaho, Wyoming and Louisiana have only vaccinated 35% of their people, Mississippi and Alabama only 30%. They feel their beliefs, their religion, will save them, good luck with that, it doesn’t work for cancer, why should it work for Covid?

The most memorable article I’ve read this month was in the “Los Angeles Times” about Patagonia: https://lat.ms/2RGwNiv You know, the company that provides all the fleece vests for the Fortune 500. Not anymore, they don’t want to be associated with that element, hurts their credibility. Think about that, every musical act whores itself out to the highest bidder and an outdoor gear company based in Ventura, California refuses to take proffered money…but it’s working for them. Turns out taking a stand is good for business.

“The retailer figured out a key lesson early: For all the corporate hand-wringing about losing customers, boycott threats are often limited to just that. If you make products that consumers want to buy, your brand can function as a political platform with little risk to the bottom line, brand strategists say. Even the free publicity of a backlash can be advantageous.”

Patagonia made shorts with the tag “Vote the Assholes Out,” they sold out quickly.

Patagonia “says there has never been a material sales decline when it has dabbled in contentious issues.”

And:

“‘It’s worth losing a few customers — we always gain more when we take one of these positions,’ spokesperson Corley Kenna said. Plus, a tweet pledging to boycott doesn’t automatically equal a lost sale: ‘Everyone says they’re a customer, but the truth is, if we had all of those customers, we’d be a lot bigger.'”

But the piece-de-resistance is after donating to Planned Parenthood Patagonia told all the complainers that phoned in that for every negative call the company received, they donated another $5 to Planned Parenthood. Needless, to say the calls stopped pretty quickly.

But all these musical acts are afraid to take a stand for fear of pissing off a potential customer. They’re dead wrong, it helps them!

But even worse is the government. If you read Michael Lewis’s book “Premonition,” you’ll learn that the CDC is a retro political organization not to be trusted. Which is why it dropped mask requirements, to appease the wankers.

The same wankers watching Fox.

I just went to the Fox website, did they have anything about the Indian variant, a need to get a vaccination? Of course not, the headline was about Obama sucking the Democrats dry. Laughable, if the outlet’s adherents weren’t risking their lives.

Everybody in government is afraid of pissing somebody off, they’re afraid of the saber-rattlers, the anti-vaxxers, they believe if they double-down they’ll pay the price, getting voted out of office. But as you can see from Patagonia above, that is patently untrue. Taking a stand bonds your believers even closer to you.

How Covid vaccinations became a political issue I’ll never know. Trump has been vaccinated, and Tucker Carlson won’t say he wasn’t, which means he was, but they’re preying on the ignorant, demonizing taxes when the truth is red states get a disproportionate amount of government money. But don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

“Why So Many People Are Resisting Vaccination”: https://nyti.ms/3oR4Tww

This “New York Times” article goes back to the history, because you learn from the past, right? Wrong! First and foremost the fact that this essay is in the “New York Times” means that many people will discount it outright. Funny that so much of Fox’s programming is based on reacting to what’s in the “New York Times,” but that’s because Fox has got no real newsgathering operation.

“Early in the 20th century, it was not uncommon for children to suffer the agonies of infectious diseases or witness family members who did. Children got terribly sick and died at home. Their survivors — including some of our grandparents and great-grandparents — were intimately acquainted with the sights, sounds and smells of dying and with the deaths of siblings or their own small children.

Thankfully, those traumatic experiences are long past us. Americans born after the mid-20th century belong to the vaccine-spoiled generations. Most probably don’t know what diphtheria is or that it was a leading cause of childhood death in the United States before immunizations became widespread. Nor can they imagine being parents helplessly watching their small child cough to death from this bacterial infection.”

People don’t realize the benefit of vaccines BECAUSE THEY’RE SO DAMN GOOD! They’ve never known the rage of diseases that used to occur. But with no knowledge of the past and an aversion to facts, they don’t know that the reason these drug companies delivered the Covid vaccines so quickly is that they’ve been working on them since the SARS outbreak nearly twenty years ago. But it’s better to trust your gut rather than the facts. Better to trust faux news outlets like Fox. Better to trust your friends, your tribe…but aren’t these the same people who keep saying that you need to take personal responsibility, take care of yourself?

Meanwhile, they don’t want you to have an abortion, but they do nothing about protecting people from Covid-19. But logic is a twentieth century concept at best.

So everybody should be vaccinated, for their own damn good, never mind everybody else. But no, under pressure governments are opening up their cities and states because they’re wary of the backlash, hell, Newsom is being recalled. But it’s California that’s waiting to take off masks. Meanwhile, California has the LOWEST infection rate in the country, 3 per 100,000. The top of the list, the worst? The aforementioned Wyoming, with 14 per 100,000. As for the Swedish model, putting your head in the sand and shutting nothing down? They’ve got the worst infection results of any country in Scandinavia, by far. But you probably don’t know that, having read the headlines a year ago.

So we’ve got a country that hates elites, hates education, hates facts and is poorly informed. Not every citizen, but way too many. And the tail is wagging the dog. Hell, there should be a law requiring everybody to be vaccinated. As for the stories about bad reactions and deaths, almost all are apocryphal, or twisted… Yup, they got the vaccine and immediately died…BUT IT TAKES TWO WEEKS AFTER THE SECOND SHOT FOR THE VACCINE TO WORK! Yeah, but if you say that you’re undermining your point.

This is literally life and death. The country is reopening in a rush yet a powerful variant is knocking on the door. Maybe it’ll never arrive, maybe it’ll be like all those hurricane warnings, false alarms, until you get Katrina and Sandy.

If you’re sitting at home not paying attention believing somebody else is taking care of the problem you’re sorely mistaken. It’s truly your responsibility to keep up on the news, the facts. And yes, you can trust the “New York Times” more than your buddy. The “Washington Post” and “Wall Street Journal” too. They have huge teams doing their best to get it right. Do they occasionally get it wrong? Of course! But that does not mean you should ignore them and trust the rabble-rousers.

It’s your call.

And your risk.

I’ve got to ask you punk, do you feel lucky?