COVID, Continued

Today could be the day I get COVID-19 and die.

But if it isn't, it will be yet another day in which I ignored every single piece of medical advice handed out on "CNN Plus" and suffered no penalties as a result. Of course, the whole staff of Riverside Green is fully quad-boosted, but let's just imagine for the sake of discussion that I never allowed Pfizer or Moderna to inject me with an experimental drug. The vast majority of my vaxxed co-workers have gotten COVID; a few of them have gotten it more than once. The more they get the vaxx, the more they seem to get COVID. Most of my triple-vaxxed friends have gotten it as well.

My son and I traveled across the country several times over the past few years. Other than skipping a few international flights because the borders were closed, I never stopped traveling; hell, I was literally staying in New York's Chinatown when the first panicked "stay home" demands were made, and I've returned to NYC a few times since. I attended a zillion "super-spreader" events, stood in lift lines from West Virginia to NorCal. Never got it. My kid never got it. My wife never got it.

All of this, despite the fact that I am so susceptible to pneumonia that I have almost died from it twice. I once literally dragged myself out of a hospital against medical advice with nine fractured bones and a burned-out spleen just because I thought I was starting to get pneumonia symptoms. I am terrified of pneumonia and do not think I am in any way immune to diseases of any sort.

I'm not saying I'm smarter than anyone else. I am saying that the iceberg bulk of what has been said, written, and propagandized about COVID-19 is provably wrong. But why listen to me, when you could listen to an actual data scientist who thinks the same thing?

Scott Locklin has just written Part 2 of his COVID retrospective. Anyone with a room-temperature or above IQ who reads his article will conclude that our leaders are too deeply stupid to be allowed to run a neighborhood lemonade stand, and rightly so. Which is not to suggest that they are not evil. They are. Do not mistake their stupidity for lack of malice. But they are also stupid. Which is not surprising. Our political leaders are chosen via a popularity contest that is rigged by the media even if it isn't actually rigged at the ballot-counting level, which it often is. Our corporate leaders are mostly chosen because they are tall. The people who determine the scope of permissible discourse in America all come from the same schools, said schools being hotbeds of identity politics and other measures designed to dissipate intellectual merit in favor of groupthink and agreeability.

Your humble author's retreat from polite society into the backwoods, a process which is proceeding by leaps and bounds and may even include a poured concrete barn floor by this time next week, has been a genuine lesson in how stupid the American elite truly is. Because the dudes out there who are building barns and pouring foundations and installing culverts and whatnot are, in my opinion, at least half an SD more intelligent on the whole than the people with whom I have shared any number of corporate offices. And they are several times as effective as the average cubicle drone. They identify problems and solve them on the fly with essentially none of the masturbatory meet-and-talk culture that infests the "knowledge workplace".

There's a lot more math nowadays in planning a fence than there is in a drag-and-drop Kubernetes DevOps cluster-truck, yet apparently people can do it while wearing a "Bass Pro Shops" hat. Who would have thought? Planting food and raising animals requires far more thought, and has far more potential for disaster, than building PowerPoint "decks" or mindlessly repeating the latest Malcolm Gladwell inanities -- yet the food is grown year after year without fail while the master-planned-by-Harvard-doctorates economy continues to spiral into oblivion.

The very existence of COVID-19 speaks to the idiocy of "elite" Americans. There isn't a single farmer in Ohio stupid enough to take unnecessary risks with his crops or his livestock, but our scientists have joyfully devoted insane amounts of money and effort to gain-of-function research that is almost certainly responsible for this pandemic in the first place. And they lied about it. Again and again. While the media backed their play. Forget Hunter Biden's laptop, a bit of "Russian disinformation" that turned out to be 100% true; this is far more serious, and deadly, to everyone.

Everyone who doesn't live in Eastern Europe, that is.

But I digress.

Go read Scott's blogpost. It's enlightening and scary all at once. And pray for me that I don't catch COVID-19 -- although in reality I'm probably much more at risk from that other alphanumeric combination known as ZX-14R.