Still and all, I'm not going to let that get me down. I'm seeing positive signs. At the risk of sounding George R.R. Martinesque, FALL is coming. I've given up rationing the air conditioning because I know I won't need to pay for it much longer. Might as well get a bit of a jump on the cool. Remember in childhood how we loved the first days of summer vacation because we had the longest stretch of the year before we had to go back to school? I'm feeling right now like a kid at the end of the school year who knows the teachers are all just walkin' it in now and we're all just living for the bell. We don't have to do any more assignments or tests. The teachers' curriculums are completed, so now we're getting a lot of movies and fun classes. Some of my favourite teachers are just asking, not making us write essays, just asking what we're going to do for the summer. Our former jailors are now being kind to us. We've served our time. Freedom is at hand! I've got a similar sort of feeling right now.
Oddly, the weather is not getting warmer, it's getting cooler, and work is not coming to an end, it's just getting started again. But this IS in adulthood, a time of year that makes me as giddy as the early summer did when I was a kid. Though I AM starting work in a couple of days, and actually have a workshop tomorrow, I feel like Papillon poised on the cliff with a crude and questionable floatation device ready to plunge to liberty or death. Liberty from what, you might ask. Well aside from the stuff in the first paragraph, there are other hardships in Korean summer that make the completion of it feel to me like surviving some Herculean trial every year I'm here.
Mosquitoes. Now I dunno if you can add Covid to the other deadly shit these abortions of creation carry, but they're plenty annoying without it. I've said it before, mosquitoes are my albatrosses. Or I suppose, to give the Ancient Mariner accurate allusion, my eels. The day I can look at a mosquito with appreciation for its nature and not pure disgust - that's the day I'll find instant enlightenment or have my arse raptured right off this planet. I don't see that day ever coming though. You can talk about the biological wonders of their construction and reproduction and flight and all that, but I fear I will see them as superfluous vermin till the day I die. And the small, fast, Korean mosquito that understands silent stealth and camouflage, they're that much worse.
Add to the agita caused by the mosquitoes, packing any compost garbage in ziplock bags or else suffering a deluge of fruit flies a few days later. Throw an apple core into an open trash receptacle at your own peril! Fruit flies will find it and once you have them, it'll be a lengthy battle to get rid of them. Lesser pests like drain flies, water worms, and some others - they will all soon die icy and poetically retributive deaths! YEAH!
Sweat. It ain't the heat, it's the humidity and summer is the rainy season. Clothes take days to dry sometimes here in Korea. You can wave your hand in the air and get it wet. And although there may be health benefits to a four-month wet sauna, I can live without it. Any trip to a location farther away than the corner store requires a bag with a spare shirt, towel and water. I am not kidding! This is why I thank every holy entity for fear of missing one that I didn't have to work for July and August. June was bad enough, and even May is sometimes a challenge. Add to that the extra pleasure of wearing a mask and getting your nose and mouth (and in my case beard and mustache) a mini steam bath from your nose and mouth... well, you can see why I may welcome cooler weather.
But before I start complaining and bellyaching... doo dee doo... I thought I'd tackle a couple more pieces of odd logic I've come across in my cyber travels. Here's the first one. Now, I don't know how long that link will last. I have seen other similar links posted and they've been blocked with the warnings of either "partially incorrect" or just "incorrect," after being fact checked. But if you manage to read the article, what is it saying? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but at its very essence, that article can be summed up by saying Coronavirus/Covid 19 is bad for everyone, but it's only a little dangerous to most of us. It's only super dangerous to less than 1% and most of them are old guys anyways. SOOO let's get back to work. Work is good for everyone, but it's only a little profitable for most of us. It's only super profitable to less than 1% and most of them are old guys anyways.
What? Am I wrong? The over 160,000 deaths in America that have been attributed to Covid 19 are not all JUST from Covid 19. This seems to be proffered, to Americans, as reasoning to be LESS afraid of the virus. It's not THAT dangerous. It's only killed 9,683 people on its own. It's relatively harmless! But let's remember, that's 9,683 Americans. And in a population as large as America, that number might draw comparisons to other things that are considered to be relatively harmless. For instance, the one you just KNOW will come up, (and DID in the article with the HK flu) the flu was associated with 34,200 deaths in America last year. So compare 9600 to 34,000. "We stay working during flu season, don't we? We've been lied to! Conspiracy! Hypocrisy!" Record scratch... Hey wait a minute, did that say "associated with?" Could that mean there are "comorbidities" attached to flu deaths every year too? I think it could. Hmmm... What would some of those be?
A lot of the comorbidities (a word that formerly belonged to the medical community but is a new buzzword amongst Covid conspiracy alarmists) are the same for both Covid 19 and the Flu. If you have heart trouble, respiratory complications, diabetes, kidney trouble, cancer, immune deficiencies, Down's Syndrome, obesity, well, here's a list. I'm not going to go down the list and calculate how many Americans have all of those health issues, but let's have some fun and do just a couple, shall we? Let's start with obesity because I have mentioned it before here, over 70 million adults in the U.S. are obese. That's pretty darn close to 40%. Kids are closer to 20%. Approximately 38.4% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. 34.2 million Americans have diabetes and 88 million more have pre-diabetes. Again we're looking at the 40% area.
If you go down the list and you are an American who can say you are free from any of these "comorbidities," you are absolutely NOT a member of the majority. In fact, the U. S. of A. is statistically the country MOST in danger from Covid 19! This news provided by the folks who are trying to convince you otherwise. lol. Now I'm certain that it's probably the country that TESTS the most for all of these comorbidities too, so if you want to dredge up that Trumpian gem...
But let's read a bit further in the article. "How do we stop this fearmongering?" it asks. I started picturing an author wearing a tinfoil hat when I read, "... a collapsing economy, used as an excuse to get rid of paper money and usher in a worldwide digital currency that will be controlled by unelected parties who will essentially rule the world and needlessly force vaccines on the entire human population." Unelected parties eh? Already happening. Not just in the federal elections either. And aside from the vaccine pushing, which I admit to being partially concerned about given the HUGE money involved and the constant lobbying to allow drugs to be released to the public with less and less testing, the main concern seems to be about money. A very Republican concern. A LOT of the people pushing this type of agenda are Trump supporters, I'm going to say that now. The people I see posting this crap are Trump supporters and I'm sure the majority, and maybe as near as makes no diff, ALL of the people who believe it, are Trump supporters. The same people who have been telling us for almost 4 years how spectacular the economy is! And to be clear, that narrative didn't suddenly stop with the onset of the Coronavirus. Bezos didn't become the first 200 billion dollar man before the Coronavirus.
When confronted with the prospect of disproving Trump and his sycophants, it's been the experience of comedians, political pundits, reporters and myself that very often, the best course of action is to get Trump to disprove himself. And here is an August 31, 2020 press conference in which Trump starts off bragging, as usual, about the economy. Which is it? Is the economy "collapsing," or is it a "tremendous achievement: Best in 36 years."?
And doesn't he then go on to push vaccines that definitely will NOT be fully tested? And you just KNOW they'll be making drug companies rich!
And, oh, by the way, isn't Trump a leader of one of those "unelected parties?" He didn't get the most votes, he prevailed in 2016 due to the fucked up electoral college. And history will probably show he was also PUTIN a position to become president with some assistance from outside sources.
It's a constant source of amusement to me how Trump and his supporters seem to shoot themselves in the foot contradicting themselves so often and so efficiently that they look like they are staging personal debates when they speak or tweet or post memes or argue online. The timing of this illogical logic is its explanation, folks. We're a couple of months away from the election. This is just a sad attempt to make it look like the president knew what he was doing all along. Trust him. You'll notice that in the above press conference he goes on to slag Biden and talk about defending the beloved citizens of America from violent protests by ending them as quickly as the vaccines will be flogged on them... with violence. He condemns protestors who are marching against things he doesn't like, then later defends protestors who violently marched in support of him, but does he ever mention a plan for his next 4 years? Election promises, a party platform, a recovery plan? Nope. He wants America to trust him. He wants them to believe he's got a great plan when in fact he'll just give a lot more dough to the rich and make the workers of America pay for it... again... but this time under the guise of digging America out of the hole Corona has put them in. That's why they won't let him tell you. But Trump hates being told what to do. Keep an eye and ear open, he'll let the cat out the bag soon enough. He plans to tax your asses off if he's re-elected. This "socialism" of Covid relief packages has got to end!
This leads us to the next bit of illogical logic I encountered this week. It is the common dismissive discarding of the very thing that would be MOST effective in digging the U.S. out of its Coronavirus hole. I say "would" because I don't think it "will" happen. The solution, as it was last time the US was in this position, would be socialism. And I am constantly hearing people ignorantly saying things like, "We can't just give people free shit," when referring to socialism. First of all, that's not what socialism is, it's just what we've been socialized into believing it is. Secondly, and since we've all heard the first argument many times, the part I'd like to focus on right now, why the hell CAN'T we just give people shit? Have you ever thought about that? No? Well let's think about that.
What is the American dream? If you say it's to work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and through innovation and enterprise become richer than you've ever dreamed, I'd say you're only about half right. Why do Americans bust their asses working every day? Why did American soldiers fight in all those wars and why do they still fight today? Ask them. I have met a lot of American soldiers and have yet to meet a single one of them who has selfishly said he or she became a solder to get rich. I've met many OTHER Americans and have yet to meet any (although I know they exist) who do their jobs just to get rich. There's a second part to the American dream that people disregard when they are trying to get you to fear socialism. Everybody wants to GIVE their kids the freedom and financial comfort for which they've worked so hard. "Well we can't just give people free shit!" But isn't that what you all (or y'all) want to do? Is the American dream partially socialist? Oh my GOD! Say it isn't so!
Here's an example of how business can operate fairly. Call it socialism if you must, but when CEO's and shareholders don't get obscenely unfair shares of profits, companies, and that means workers AND management, companies prosper. Better than otherwise. But try to convince greedy people of this.
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