…and I’ll be over here coughing.
Usually I introduce these Friday fora with some reference to current events, but I woke up sick for the second straight day, and this time I feel too foggy to focus.
So I’m counting on you while I have two cups of Italian roast and some DayQuil. Yum.
Ethics Alarms 
Coincidentally, my wife has been fighting a fever of 103 (cue “Hot Blooded”) for the past three days now, elevated temperatures for a couple of days before that. I’m not sure what she has, but she’s refusing to see a doctor and trying to keep the fever down with Tylenol and cold baths. Scapegrace that I am, I’m absent in California, so am of no help at all with tending house, our four girls, our cats, life…
I have a lingering issue, when I have a cold, where if I go out in public I have to fight down the urge to hide the fact that I have any symptoms whatsoever, because if I sneeze, cough, blow my nose, or speak with a frog in my throat, people will panic that I have the dreaded Wu-Flu. Does anyone else here at Ethics Alarms suffer from this lingering feeling? (I know it impacts a lot of people still, given the number of people I still see wearing masks in public places.) Most specifically, I would describe the feeling as concern that other people see me as a threat, and I have to be on guard against preemptive strikes, or something like that.
Oh, and I hope you get feeling better soon, Jack. I prefer honey, lemon juice, hot water, and a shot of bourbon.
I still see plenty of masks in public, especially among the African-American community. We attend large pop culture conventions and there are still many mask-wearers among the fans. I do think that COVID has made people more alert to coughs and sneezes than we all used to be. Unfortunately, there are still many conditions out there that aren’t COVID, such as seasonal allergies, that have the same symptoms.
Con Crud – basically an illness you pick up at a convention because of the crush of hundreds of bodies practicing varying degrees of hygiene and sanitation – has long been the risk of going to these events. Since fans at these types of shows tend to skew progressive/liberal, you start seeing social media posts immediately after the event reporting positive COVID test results. It’s almost a ritual now.
Just saw a woman yesterday in the parking lot at Walgreens wearing an N-95 mask. A retirement community, so maybe explainable but I thought they don’t work anyway. We’ve become China.
Actually Old Bill, N-95 masks work pretty well to prevent people from breathing in germs from surrounding air or exhaling your germs to the surrounding air, it’s the basic paper or cloth masks that are false facades of safety.
In a parking lot?
Old Bill,
Give me a freaking break OB, I think it was self-evident that I was addressing your statement “I thought they [N-95 masks] don’t work anyway” not that she was wearing one in a parking lot.
Geeze…
Con crud is legit.
Too legit. I don’t get it often, but I got it after GalaxyCon Columbus 2022 and after Dragon-Con 2023, Could have been COVID, too. I treated it the way I would any other bad cough/cold. And drank lots of hot water with honey in it.
Ick.
Well, actually, I’m happy to hear of another good reason not to go to Dragon Con.
Most cons, though, as vendors I think we’d be less likely to pick up that kind of crud.
Don’t know if it’s analogous, but we just did a 17 day cruise out of Boston where none of the crew and very few passengers (seemingly mostly Asian) wore masks. There didn’t appear to be many people that developed symptoms and were quarantined (judging by the absence of the “table of shame”, where they receive their meals, outside the cabin doors of the quarantined).
We don’t see much masking around here (‘burbs N of Atlanta) anymore, but does seem more prevalent among blacks. To be fair, they may have experienced more covid incidents in friends and family with statistically more comorbidities.
We sell books at science fiction cons here in North Carolina and in Virginia, and I noticed a difference in masking that seems to be based on location.
At a con here in the Triangle this past April, it seemed like there were a decent number of folks masking — I’m thinking 20% maybe. A week or two later we were up in Richmond and I swear that closer to half of the people there were masked.
I’m thinking that Richmond is fairly close to Washington so perhaps they get a lot of attendees from there.
Here in the grocery stores you don’t see very many people masking any longer, and I was just at a book signing in Raleigh. My guess would be that there were 100-150 people there, all sitting in rows of folding chairs, so very close together. I doubt if even 10% were masked (but there were some).
And finally, I had a doctor’s appointment today and was happy to once again see my doctor’s face for the first time since 2019. I think a lot of the employees are still wearing masks but no longer all.
Don’t know if I could tell the difference between an N95 mask and a regular paper mask, but most of the grocery store folks have the cloth masks.
If I sneeze or cough in public and I see people noticing, I usually say something along the lines of “I’m not sick. I swear.” To me, it costs me nothing to allay potential concerns of the people around me. When I see masked people my first thought is those are NOT my people. But I also see no reason to not be kind and meet them where they are at.
Feel better Jack!
Do any of you regularly participate in Threads.
I do, and here was a reply to one of my replies by magiconashelf.
Your opinion is scary! YIKES! Children’s lives are more important. The end.
Click this link for the proper context.
https://www.threads.net/@magiconashelf/post/C_sFu6OS1HE
“What about the children!” writ large. So many people seem to think people in power will always be wonderful.
It was in reply to a link that I shated in a reply on Threads.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-gun-enthusiast-still-claim-their-right-to-bear-arms-is-more-important-than-public-safety/answer/Paul-Harding-14
I was thoroughly disgusted with the speech that AG Garland gave yesterday. He’s a very small man who lies big. There he was pretending, as he has before, that he treats all equally under the law. I think he’s got a big grudge against Republicans after never getting a confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice. He’s really in everybody’s face about it too. He appointed Jack Smith unconstitutionally, as was acknowledged by the Federal Judge in Florida. So we have an attorney general who either lies about the constitutionality of that appointment, or he doesn’t understand the constitution. To be constitutional, Smith would have had to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Just about every Democrat is on board with two-tiered justice. It’s not only disgusting, but also rather worrisome, because one can easily surmise that they want a one-party state and damn the basics of democracy.
They have no inclination to stop illegal immigrants from voting, and of course they shouldn’t be here to begin with. They lie to us about that, declaring that the border is secure.
I think we have a slow-motion revolution confronting us.
For some reason the corporate media is going along. They ignore so much. We saw ABC News anchors clearly favor VP Harris this week. They fact checked Trump, and let Harris’s falsehood go with no fact checks.
It’s very hard to know what to do about it. D’s having so much governmental power and media power is very hard to overcome.
Agreed. I thought that speech was going to be him announcing the DOJ was going to stop show trials and political prosecutions. It was complete projection. He accused people of wrongly accusing the DOJ of doing … what they’re doing! The man is absolutely nuts, a lunatic. Thank God he wasn’t allowed onto the Court.
Being stuck at home and feeling crappy really sucks. Hope you feel better soon Jack.
(Add being stuck at home alone and sick. Not used to that, and I doubt I ever will be…)
Absolutely yes, being alone certainly does compound the “suckiness”.
Alright, Ethics Alarmists, please help me understand WordPress. Previously, I would receive new posts and comments on posts when I checked the appropriate box to receive new comments. Now, I get neither. Have I offended AI? If so, how does one atone for one’s sins against an internet/computer intelligence generator?
Oh, I have to log in every time I post something, pithy or otherwise.
jvb
I’ve been wrestling around with the setting in WordPress and in my browser to get that same thing fixed. It’s weird.
P.S. Haven’t fixed it yet.
What does everyone think of Biden wearing a Trump hat at this event: https://youtu.be/krzg_4qJ4EU?si=at2exLyuH_rMGWS6
Is it a mean-spirited attempt to make a demented old man look foolish? Biden being a good sport and having fun? An unjustified jab at his own party? A justified jab at those who yanked the presidency out from under him without due process?
I have to admit that I don’t understand what was going on there.
If Biden is demented, it was a mean-spirted joke. Then again, if he’s demented, letting him outside to do these public events at all is mean-spirited. If he’s not demented, we could argue that he was either being a good sport, sticking it to the Democrats or, perhaps, misunderstood what was being said (jokes going over a person’s head can happen even if they’re not cognitively impaired).
Whoever let him being filmed like that should be fired. He’s still the President.
Biden would probably put a duck on his head at this point.Calvin Coolidge still looked worse in the Indian Chief’s headdress…
My understanding was that Biden was calling for unity, and he ended up trading hats with a MAGA-wearing gentleman. Frankly, out of all the things Biden has done, being willing to be seen wearing a MAGA hat as a way of suggesting we can actually deal with each other is a decent gesture. I don’t know if that analysis stands up to a deeper scrutiny, but I’m willing to let it go at that. I hope this wasn’t another incident like the caller finishing his conversation with Biden with “and Let’s Go Brandon!” with Biden repeating it back.
I took the whole exchange as a mutual good-natured ribbing between Biden and the fellow sitting down. The Sitter called Biden an “old fart” and Biden responded with something equally playful. Then, the exchanged hats. Biden probably knew he was putting on a MAGA hat but did it anyway. There was a lot of laughter in the group.
jvb
In blind squirrel finds acorn (but decides acorns are bad) news, NYT declares technological progress supports libertarianism in freeing individuals from state control.
In related news, wife-beater and huckster-senator squirrel (poison well? ME?) Raphael Warnock can’t think of a law that would help him find acorns, but want to pass some more to “do something”, anyway.
two links…lets see if it will show
So, the past several months I get occasional emails from Tulsi Gabbard, or at least from her organization. Mostly they are fundraising emails which I delete. This is fine, there aren’t an overwhelming number of them and they’re easily dealt with — and if I come across one that has a video by her I can watch if I want to.
But.
GMail has decided that these emails are spam and sends them direct to my spam folder.
I check that folder regularly, and what I do is to select these emails and mark them as ‘Not spam’ which sends them to my inbox (where I can delete them).
Back around May or so, I suddenly started get fund raising emails from the Biden campaign — except I was getting a lot of them. Like five or ten per day — all from the same email address but different send-from names. Those didn’t go to spam until I reported a bunch of them as spam to Gmail.
Eventually I got them to start going to spam. Perhaps eventually I’ll get Tulsi’s emails not to go to spam.
But it does make me wonder, especially knowing Tulsi’s been put on a terrorist watch list.