Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Posted, reviewed and dismissed upthread.

 

By Alma? I'm shocked, shocked! Beulah, bring the smelling salts, I'll be on the fainting couch.

"Do we want to test them daily? The only reason we’re doing that with athletes is because, without it, the hand-wringing over them not getting tested all the time would be relentless from the media." And here I was under the delusion that the testing was done to keep these athletes safe while they perform for us. UAB will play at Rice today with 42 scholarship players. Without testing, how many plague carriers would be on that sideline infecting their teammates? Hell, how many will be there anyway, because they have not popped a positive yet?

Without testing, how many infectious nurses are in intimate contact with patients who are already sick enough to be in the hospital? There are hospitals so short of help now that nurses who are known to have been exposed are continuing to work as long as they are not showing overt symptoms.

The bottom line is that anyone with their priorities screwed on straight knows that keeping front line health workers safe is far more important to society than keeping ball games on TV.

 

Don't care for his pious posturing, either. But he's the bleeping Dr. Fauci of money advice, complete in that Americans by and large don't listen to him, either, to their demise.

Not if it's done to gin up patriotism for some foreign bomb-dropping enterprise.

 

It is also important to keep Hollywood’s industry in business.

Give me mah Netflix!

 

The big tell from Ramsey in that article was his referral to "eight dollar an hour dweebs" or however it was he put it. I've heard that sort of talk from both sides of my family. It usually happens before and after they flex about church and how they're justlikethis with Jesus. (Not so much with the neighbors they're supposed to love as themselves.) They're all prosperous and yet seem to have no sense of abundance in their lives because there's never enough. We love to talk about the freakish end of the prosperity gospel people, but the truth is, Ramsey has presented a more acceptable version of it to people who like to see themselves as better than the rank and file human. A lot of his actual financial advice is sound. However, he wraps it in aspirational spins and misinterpreted scripture that appeals to the kind of person who wants affirmation they really are just a year or two away from the boat, the country club membership, and a step or ten up the social ladder.

I don't think that's why we are still seeing stories like this.

I have friends in Memphis who work with The Faces of COVID Project. Some of them worked with me on NAMES and there are a few who work with CARES now.

Even as far back as the late eighties, when NAMES started, people were saying it was overkill. Their argument was everyone already knew about AIDS, and it was pointless to put that much effort into creating memorial quilts. Aside from it being a beau geste for people who saw friends, family, and churches refuse to name their kin who succumbed to AIDS, it was a way to remind everyone who saw those panels their loved ones existed. It gave a face and told about the lives of people like them. It might just sink in that this could happen to them.

We can't know who had their Saul of Tarsus moment then and we can't know that know. Sometimes it can come from places that might seem silly to the rest of us, but if it hits home and makes someone think twice about their beliefs and actions, it's valuable. An instance that comes to mind is a woman who admitted to being fairly narrow-minded about who got AIDS and had so time or sympathy for people who wanted to keep talking about avoidance of risky behavior. Then she had this big wakeup call and started pestering the media, churches, everyone she could get to listen. What changed her mind? She read about Elizabeth Glaser's death from complications from HIV. She was a big Starsky and Hutch fan and reading about the Glasers finally got through to her.

We might see a story like that and think, "Really?" It was important to her. It might take the 50th or 150th account to get someone to wonder if they might not be better off, heck, if they might not be a better person if they consider doing something for someone else's good.

People are still getting sick from AIDS and HIV.
People are still contracting COVID.

As long as this is happening, we still need to talk about it.

 

I agree they’re heroes. Absolutely.

The stories tend to lean into portraying them more as victims.

That said, that’s a thing in our culture right now. Victimhood as heroism. Journalists prefer to extend piety and sympathy, rather than confer respect. It seems to be a very specific posture.

 

You don’t think that’s a useful counterpoint to me, do you?

 

Why was he in the hospital?

 

Here in Tennessee, hospitals are asking for volunteer support staff.

 

I thought you were in Kentucky!

 

He had some sort of procedure done, something he had to be sedated for. Colonoscopy or something on that order.

 

These containers used to ship fresh tuna. Now they'll deliver Covid-19 vaccines - CNN