Did I ever mention my own experiences with the Wuhan Flu?

My Big Boss is out right now with Covid. The other two people I share an office with have had it…more than once. My mini-boss has had it. About 80% of my office, at some point, has had it. So far I have not. And..I’m not vaccinated.

Back in late 2019/early 2020 me and a buddy both got sick for about three weeks. We were miserable. And then came the news that the Chinese had this new virus. I suspect with almost 100% certainty that me and my buddy were one of the ‘early adopters’ of Covid. I distinct;ly remember working at Cabela’s gun counter and we kept bottles of hand sanitizer and wipes on the counter every few feet because ‘theres a really nasty bug going around this winter’. I am certain it was the arrival of Covid.

Since then, I haven’t been sick. No cold, no nothin’.And I dismissed it as a somewhat more virulent version of the flu so I never bothered to get the shot.

For the record, I also don’t get flu shots every year either. I’m reasonably healthy, no comorbidities, am in decent shape, and don’t have any pre-existing conditions. For me, I saw no need to go get a shot that was brand new and without a long track record. I’m not saying vaccines don’t work…I’m just saying I’m not gonna be the ‘early adopter’ who gets batch #0001.

So, I’ve spent the last four years being unvaccinated and not getting sick. I’m no medical expert, and all I have going for me is an opinion, but I think perhaps that ubernasty bug I caught four years ago was The Bug and since then my body has built up some resistance to it. Or I’m just lucky. :::shrug::: All I know is that I never saw the need for a vaccine shot for me so I never got one, and as time has gone by I haven’t regretted it.

I feel bad for people who didnt want to get one but were forced to at the threat of losing their jobs. The ‘vaccinate or else’ crowd has a lot to answer for, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, the whole Covid/Kung Flu experience has been a dress-rehearsal for how to control and clamp down on a population. Fly the flag of ‘health emergency’ and people were lining up to be vaccinated, masked, denied access to healthcare, denied access to grocery stores, denied access to public transport, denied access to…well…everything. It would be a bit intellectually dishonest for me to say that my non-vaccinated status didn’t gave me a bit of satisfaction whenever someone pontificated about how ‘those people’ needed to be brought to heel whether they wanted it or not.

And now…wow..we went from ‘self quarantining’ for 14 days, to a week, to five days, to ‘just stay home if you have a fever’. Hmmm.

The more astute people will say that the current flavor of Covid isnt the same as the one that started all this and therefore the inconsistency in the range of precautions is to be expected. I really can’t respond to that. All I know is that whatever I had four years ago was the last thing that knocked me on my tail and all these ‘new’ variants seem to have passed my unvaxxed butt by.

This has been my experience though. And it was my decision to not get vaccinated. And it was my willingness to accept the consequences of that decision. And I fully recognize that, perhaps, in the long term it was a foolish choice. Or maybe it wasn’t. I guess I won’t know for a while. But I sure am interested in how the narrative has changed so much from what it used to be. It seems like the world basically panicked and threw everything at the wall to see what stuck, and now we’re finding out that perhaps we overreacted. And all it cost us was the economy, jobs, liberty, and vitriol.

But .gov sure made out like a bandit, didn’t they? They got to discover that in addition to using the excuse of ‘security’ and ‘terrorism’, they can now get even better results by claiming ‘health emergency’ and the people will happily accept whatever is imposed on them. Thats the real long-lasting damage from this whole affair, if you ask me.

More than one person sent me a link to this, but I actually caught it myself this morning while perusing the news:

• Costco shoppers have complained on Twitter that some stores are out of toilet paper and water.
• The warehouse chain is also limiting the number of products people can buy, several customers said.
• There is some evidence that stockpiling could return as the Delta variant spreads.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Costco shoppers say some stores are out of toilet paper and water, as research indicates that US consumers are considering stocking up on essentials as the Delta variant spreads.

Dozens of Costco shoppers recently complained on Twitter about product shortages and restrictions on the number of products they can buy. Grocery stores imposed restrictions early in the pandemic to stop people from panic buying and depleting stock.

Who the heck is buying this stuff? Either you bought it all at the last panic and still have plenty, or you didnt stockup last time and, unsurprisingly, found out that there wasn’t really a need to stock up after all…and therefore have no interest in doing so this time around.

I suppose we should look to what has become the barometer of panic buying – TP, rice, and ammo. Ammo is still out where the buses don’t run, but TP and rice bounced back pretty quickly.

I didn’t really buy at the last panic, and I’m definitely not buying at this one. Why? Because for the last 25 years I’ve lived a lifestyle that assumes stuff like this is going to happen next weekend. I had my supply of TP, ammo, rice, batteries, and bleach long before some of you reading this were even born.

Honestly, Im less worried about Wuhan Flu (which has a , what?, 96% survival rate for the unvaccinated among the otherwise-healthy?) and far, far more worried about the economy, inflation, and our current foreign ‘policy’.

Speaking of Wuhan Flu, some ‘woke’ person gave me a hard time about using that term. “Don’t you know Asians are being beat up on streets because people use that term and it makes Asians a target?” Because, apparently, this virtue-signalling self-appointed guardian of language and outrage-by-proxy didn’t know that, historically, flus and viruses are named after where they originate. Ebola? Hantavirus? Legionnaires disease? Named after the initial outbreaks, thank you very much. Learn some history before you step up on that soapbox.

Sometime in the future, maybe soon, the source of the Wuhan Flu is going to become known and the Chinese are gonna have some major damage control. Just a harmless ol’ bioweapons lab that was playing with weaponizing a flu virus…nothing to see here.

In the meantime, though….I’m fairly pleased with how, so far, I’ve managed to deal with it. I see these idiots on television going on about how they haven’t been able to visit with their friends in a year, they haven’t been able to visit dad and mom since 2020, and they can’t go out to restaurants like they used to….and now need extensive mental health interventions to avoid depression and loneliness. Seriously? If not being able to see your friends for a year throws you into a mental state that renders you dysfunctinal, then the problem isn’t Wuhan Flu..the problem is that you’re life was empty, your sense of individuality was wonky, and, in general…well… you’re a pussy.

So..delta variant, lambda variant, omega variant, tau variant, whatever variant….bring it on.

Life continues in the time of the great plague…

I was reading an article, and then confirmed it by checking real estate listings, that says people are fleeing the major population centers in droves and purchasing property in out-of-the-way locales like Montana. This is my surprised face. /s

Two things keep everyone from moving to Montana: economics and the weather. We have some nasty and long winters, and that tends to keep some people away. The bigger factor was economics: jobs don’t grow on trees here (although it used to be you could get jobs cutting trees down). But if there is one thing that the Kung Flu has taught us, it is that all those jobs that we were told could not be done from home can, surprise!, be done from home. As a result, there’s a lot of people who are discovering that they can keep their Chicago, L.A., or Dallas salary while living in a remote place like Montana.

This happened before in the id 1980’s…Montana became the place to be. it tapered off a little, hit the map again when the Y2k thing came up, and then sorta died down a bit. But, make no mistake, the notion that you can move to Montana and buy a couple miles of beautiful land for a few dollars is pure fantasy.  Oh, there’s parts of the state, eastern mostly, where you can buy some big chunks of land for a few thousand dollars an acre but you’re talking flat-as-a-cookie-sheet, middle of nowhere, no water, no utilities, might-as-well-be-on-the-moon types of parcels. And, for some people, thats ideal. Most folks though want something with, you know, water. And septic. And electricity.

If you think you’ll move to one of the larger cities in Montana be prepared to pay dang near as much as if you were living in NY or Seattle. The median house price in this college town is around $250k, and most houses are north of that going as high as half a million.

And, unfortunately, the problem with people from NYC, L.A., and Chicago moving out here is that they bring their attitudes (and voting records) with them and wind up turning the new place into the place they just left. There was a time in this state when having a California license plate on your car was a recipe for getting some major attitude and bad vibes from the locals. Still is in some places.

It’s going to be a reverse Grapes Of Wrath… instead of poor rural dwellers heading to the promised land of big cities it’s going to be affluent urbanites heading to the bucolic idyll of the country.

I suppose it was inevitable that eventually the telecommuting promise that we were made thirty years ago would finally come to pass.

So, this will be another consequence of the Kung Flu…a surge in population in my beloved Treasure State. And a lot of that surge being people coming in from states that I’d just as soon build a fence around and lock the gate.

For those of you who continue to live in more urban locales, perhaps it’ll be a buying opportunity as motivated sellers try to get out ‘to the country’. For those of us already here…well…it’s gonna kinda suck.

Yesterday was the day that barbershops here in town were allowed to open.They’d been open elsewhere in the county, but our local .gov wanted to show that they were ‘doing something’ about the virus. I think I’ve done a halfway decent job with my own clippers. Not perfect, but if you think your hair needs to be perfect then you clearly need more important things in your life to worry about. I think that, for the time being, I’m gonna save myself twenty bucks a month and keep working with the clippers. I can live with a cowlick here and there for twenty bucks.

So far, for me, thats been the biggest headache resulting from the Current Situation. They may be dropping like flies in Cuomo-land but our hospitals here are quiet and boring with none of the chaos and drama that the evening news likes to showcase.

:::shrug::: I live in a state with barely 1/20th the population of New York spread out over three times the square miles….social distancing is measured in miles here. But…not to pass up on opportunity to throw his considerable weight around, our local mayor – a philandering, alcoholic, overeating statist – decided that this was a great opportunity to flex and issued all sorts of orders.

As I’ve said, tongue-in-cheek, this is the lamest apocalypse ever. But, as I’ve also said, the flu isn’t the real headline…the real headline is all the downhill stuff as a result of it. Sadly, one of those effects will be more government control with the usual ‘for the common good’ pass.

One size does not fit all when it comes to government. What works in California or New York may not work here, and vice versa. But to assume that whats good for one state is good for another….well…that might be a little much. Laws and police thuggery might be what it takes to ‘flatten the curve’ in a cage with nine million people in it like NYC. But in my little bucolic college town it’s a tad heavy handed.

I know, I know….our mayor (aka “The Biggest Boozer”) will no doubt say that because of his edicts we have been spared the ravages of a Covid-19 outbreak similar to what they have experienced in NYC. And…you can’t really disprove a negative…so a lot of people will go along with it. But there’s just some reflexive response within me that chafes when .gov starts doing things like this. Maybe it really does make a difference, maybe it has saved ‘millions of registered voters’, maybe we’d all be dead of of the flu right now if they hadn’t threatened to throw my barber in jail…or maybe not.

All I know is that I haven’t been able to get a haircut for the last two months and I can’t shake the feeling that it was a lot of sturm und drang over something that wasn’t as big a threat here as it was elsewhere.

Locally, things are starting to ‘re-open’. Restaurants opened last week and today, finally, barbershops. I firmly believe that every business in this town should demand the city refund a prorated amount of the business license fees. The city extorted money from you to allow you to open a business and then they said you can’t open….the reason behind it is irrelevant, you paid for something and the city withheld it…seems like a partial refund is in order.

I’m going to go ahead and keep cutting my own  hair and see how long it takes before it just becomes so cocked up that only a visit to a professional will salvage my dignity.

I miss eating out every so often, and I also miss being able to do my banking face-to-face with a teller….but other than that, I haven’t been terribly inconvenienced by business shutdowns. I am, however, probably going to be indirectly affected by it as people without jobs start getting desperate. This is an excellent time to look around and determine whare are the skills that pay the bills in a crisis like this.

I can’t speak for the heavy population centers, but for here, in my quaint little 100,000 person town, it seems like people are getting a bit complacent and things are starting to have a little semblance of calm… no more panic lines at CostCo, most of the grocery shelves are restocked, etc. I think people are getting used to the ‘new normal’ and the sense of urgency and immediate need to ‘do something’ is diminishing. I also have no doubt it’ll get stirred up as soon as the media latches on to some new Kung Flu related item to flog to the public.

All in all, so far, lame apocalypse. Unless you actually catch the Kung Flu. But for me, for now, it’s mostly been a cross between a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse and a controlled experiment/drill.