Views from the Outside

 I originally started this blog to document some of the things that happened during the Coronavirus era so that I wouldn't forget them.  Now it's 5 years later and a lot of retrospection is going on in some circles. In some ways, for me personally, it seems like Covid-19 never happened.  Things have been back to normal for quite some time now and honestly there were bigger issues that I personally had to face during 2020 (notably: cancer).  Yet at the same time, it seems like a liminal moment: there was an era before Covid and a different era after. I've taken to calling the before-time "BC" (Before Corona).  It's a memorable enough event that I can identify whether something has happened BC or not.  I don't have a clever name for the after-time. One notable indication of the effect of the virus on American society is that Donald Trump was re-elected President of the United States.  Trump, of course, was president when the Rona hit these shores and it ...

 Luke 22-26 (ESV) 22 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” So they set out, 23 and as they sailed he fell asleep. And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water and were in danger. 24 And they went and woke him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and the raging waves, and they ceased, and there was a calm. 25 He said to them, “Where is your faith?” And they were afraid, and they marveled, saying to one another, “Who then is this, that he commands even winds and water, and they obey him?” My dog doesn't like thunder.  The change in pressure doesn't worry him, wind and rain don't even wake him up and lightening doesn't seem to worry him, but thunder drives him mad. I try to look at it from his perspective: thunder is loud and the walls will shake under a good thunderclap and perhaps even the floor vibrates a little and he can ...

 Not much going on on the Covid Front.  Over the past winter, there was some murmur of concern over the dreaded "triple-demic" which would be RSV, the Flu and Covid.  But with cold weather in the rear-view mirror, that was clearly a bust.  Here are the current graphs for ER visits for those three, from the CDC's website. The CDC doesn't track Flu incidence by month and year like they do with Covid, but they do have a yearly comparison of hospitalizations, comparing this year's estimate to previous years (as the dots on the y axis.  The spread is pretty crazy, going all the way up over 600K, but I highlighted where their actual estimate for 2023/2024 is showing that it was probably not that significant of a season. In a previous post, I speculated that RSV was some new thing that no one really understood.  The name "RSV" kind of looks like Respiratory ... Virus and so I think it's just the flu but apparently it's something else altogether.  But it...

  https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/opinion/oh-now-our-public-health-poohbahs-tell-us-our-covid-approach-was-narrow-minded/ I like the "poohbah" in the URL Clipped in case the URL breaks (by Rich Lowry) Our public health officials are getting around to admitting the fallibility of public health officials.  Francis Collins, the former of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and current science adviser to President Biden, noted that he and his colleagues demonstrated an “unfortunate” narrow-mindedness. This is a welcome, if belated, confession. Not too long ago, anyone who said that epidemiologists might be overly focused on disease prevention to the exclusion of other concerns — you know, like jobs, mental health and schooling — were dismissed as reckless nihilists who didn’t care if their fellow citizens died en masse. Now, Francis Collins has weighed in to tell us that many of the people considered close-minded and anti-science  during COVID  were advan...

 As of December 24 2023, the Coronavirus seems to have completely vanished from the public consciousness.  That is to say, COVID-19 is still present, but no one seems to be worried about it.  The Texas DSHS has the coronavirus weekly update buried somewhere in the depths of its site and the news rarely mentions it.  It's still the #1 topic on the CDC's site, with the lonely bureaucrats probably longing for the heady days of 2020 and 2021 when they were rockstars, but the general public has just lost interest. Personally, I notice people at work occasionally wearing masks, but not consistently. It's hard to know what criteria they are using to wear a mask or not since there's no clear way to know if cases are going up or down.  Perhaps there's another reason like allergies.  I only ever got the 1st two rona shots and never got boosted for subsequent variants and, from what I've seen, no one else is, either. Pfizer and Moderna's stocks have been on a downward...

 Is there any subject that warms the heart of red-blooded Americans more than that of a plucky underdog having his day?  A real David-and-Goliath struggle of the established bigwigs and a cocky upstart taking them all down.  It's the stuff of legends repeated over the dinner table and across bars all over the country. Books have been written about the subject such as Soul of a New Machine by Tracey Kidder, about a plucky minicomputer company called Data General, which won a Pulitzer Prize Moneyball by Michael Lewis which changed the way Baseball operates and most importantly (for Lewis) was turned into a movie Shoe Dog by Phil Knight about daring upstart sports company you may have heard of called Nike. Car by Mary Walton about the 1996 Ford Taurus which was to lead Ford back to the glory days and fight off not only GM and Chrysler but Toyota and Honda. Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, about a plucky horse with a heart of gold and the team that believed in him. and tho...