Monday, June 15, 2020

Escaping insanity.



I had to take some time off. The virtue signaling is off the charts and really starting to get to me. It's the craziest thing in the world when taking a a health crisis seriously puts you in one political category or another. I think we should do what China did - and just stop counting. What does it matter anyway?

I don't really think anyone wants to solve problems - they just want to fight about it. I think people don't really care about business as much as they want to show how good of a person they are by acting like they care.  They want your business - they just don't want your lawsuit. We are a very litigious country. It is seriously what every single business is weighing right now.

So America - YOU - DO -YOU.

I decided to hop out because I feel there isn't a zero percent chance they won't try to lock us down again. I am one of those people who has to outrun the demons in general. So the day Sensorio opened I hit that. I was a little surprised by how many other people were there. On a normal day they get 800 people apparently. I'm glad there were much less than that. I don't know how well you could avoid people with that kind of attendance. Everyone had to get their temperatures taken and sign a waiver. I think that would take a considerable amount of time for 800 people.



I don't think I've ever taken as many really bad shots as I did here. These are the few that survived. The level of difficulty was more than I expected. It's really dark out there and you really had to up your night photography game.









Then I tried to hop out to the beach. It's where my demons hide. But the beach was crazy windy. I have long-ish hair and if I have to spend more time getting hair out of my eyes than anything else - I'm not happy. We attempted a different beach, but that one was crowded and I'm not really doing crowds.





Morrow Bay was choppy as hell. Even watching the kite flyers was not fun because of the wind.





I honestly don't understand how any of the restaurants are going to survive. We've done a fair amount of truck picnics and it's fine, but it does get a little tiring. The places we stopped at pretty much ran the gamut. A lot of places don't have any outside seating at all. And when you have to cut the tables by half, there is no way these places can survive.

Other places were having staffing issues. One place lost half their staff. And some had worked there for seven years the guy said. They didn't want to come back. They were probably getting paid more than they got working so.... it's all pretty fucked up. I guess that town didn't have enough Jenny McArthy's to make up for the ones who don't want to work or are afraid to.

A burger place in Tracy on the way back in was generally the most lax. Notice how I didn't name it? It's one of my favorite burger places so I'm not narcing them out! But, no masks for staff, and they were refilling and touching everyones drinks.

Mask compliance is really slipping at this point which is not surprising. It's summer. But generally, most Americans always avoid the hard work needed for anything really. They were never going to do that long term.

12 comments:

  1. That Sensorio is really something! I'd never heard if it but I'd like to see it.

    Morro Bay, my dad grew up there in the 20' & 30's. We went up that way every now & then when we lived in SoCal (66-70), one morning we had breakfast across from the cabins my grandparents owned & rented out. The cabins are gone now.
    When I was about 5 we were camping up there on the beach next to Morro Rock. I almost drowned (what does a 5 yo know about the tides? Yesterday I could walk there!) and one night I tripped over a rope holding an army surplus tent up and put a scar on my left knee when I hit the piece of rebar doing the tent stake job' I was showing my grandson the scar last week. 60 some years ago & I do remember...

    There is a guy who is questioning the death count from the current virus, asking why 'they' are aiming for big numbers. Interest read if you care. https://www.iceagenow.info/covid19-death-figures-substantially-over-estimated/

    I'd seen Morro Rock early in my life and when I heard of Plymouth Rock & the pilgrims in school I saw them as being sort of the same in my mind. A couple of years back we made it back east & I saw Plymouth Rock, what a disappointment! They built a cage around it so some someone doesn't pick it up and take it home! :-)

    Good luck keeping it together!

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  2. Super glad you survived Rob!

    I am ~always~ willing to look at someone else point of view even if I don't agree. Because I am an adult. But I do admit I am somewhat frustrated by some of this vein. I of course would like cases to be identified by a test. But it is not that unusual at all for medicine to work this way.

    For example - my mom died of lung cancer. But she on her death certificate it listed breast cancer because the breast cancer spread to her lungs. ~That~ was the initial cause of her dying. It's no different than someone being assaulted, put in a coma for 20 years and then eventually dying of something else. The person who did the assault will still be charged with murder. Even though the person eventually died of literally anything else.

    People act as if this is not common and is some conspiracy theory. It's not. It happens all the time in medicine. Now, you can feel anyway you want about it - but that is the way medicine works and has always worked.

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  3. "Today, I have a new job, it's funny when you think of it.
    IT's a Goverment job."

    Congratulations on your new job!.......I think?

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  4. From NPR on the virus-
    https://fee.org/articles/npr-mounting-evidence-suggests-covid-not-as-deadly-as-thought-did-the-experts-fail-again/

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  5. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, June 16, 2020 8:32:00 PM

    This is the part of Middle California that I thought you were referring to.

    If you like expensive beach property, check out Cambria.

    But like a lot of other things, what's there was never going to last.

    Once upon a time, there was an incredibly nice English tea place called The Tea Cozy in Cambria, where you could have a formal afternoon tea like somewhere in the English countryside, but the people there eventually saw the writing on the wall.

    They now operate an online tea shop out of Idaho.

    "I think people don't really care about business as much as they want to show how good of a person they are by acting like they care. They want your business -- they just don't want your lawsuit. We are a very litigious country. It is seriously what every single business is weighing right now."

    Obviously many Americans are discontented with their civilization and imagine that they can somehow make it better for themselves by playing games with each other.

    And so I'm having to deal with not playing certain types of games by playing other types of games, although these involve much bigger stakes.

    "America, you do you" has to be about the most succinct way I've seen of expressing what I've been feeling for a long time.

    Back to Tocqueville: "America is great because America is good" ... yeah, I'm pretty sure we can rule this out after the decade of do-nothingness that followed Bear Stearns, MF Global, and so forth, as well as rise of The Derp State.

    Where were the pitchforks? I was expecting pitchforks.

    Back to Ben Franklin as well: "A republic, if you can keep it" ... except everyone thinks this is a democracy, and then they're surprised when they get treated to how democracy works in practice.

    America stopped being good, stopped being a republic, and so yes, things are tending toward the tide going out rather than raising all boats together.

    Eventually you realize that these little "day breaks" from the madness aren't enough and that you need a real exit from the situation.

    I stopped going over to Seaside because it shut down for The COVID Crazy, but even as things are relaxing, I'm still not going over there. Day breaks in some spot with nicely conceived architecture and friendlier people are lovely, but that doesn't solve the problems for me as well as not having to need these day breaks.

    Another passport arrived: this makes three including the US.

    Combined they give me visa-free travel to most countries that a US passport confers, with a few annoying exceptions: I'll need to go through a visa approval process to visit Japan, for instance, and worse yet I'll have to create some sort of travel itinerary, hire guides, and so forth.

    By comparison, the difficulty level for Malaysia and Singapore just got lowered by a lot, and residency in Malaysia might be interesting in a few years.

    I could give up Osaka food hipsters and Tokyo with its Akihabara for KL.

    Some people I knew in Stockholm decided they could give up Nordic state socialism for KL and they never went back, so I may yet be reunited with more friends.

    But you know those crazy relatives that you check in on not so much because you give a shit about treating their crazy or even relating to it, but because you have some kind of desire to know that they're at least alive and kicking despite their crazy?

    Yeah, America, you do you, just don't send me any post cards.

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  6. I didn't really peg you for an NPR guy Rob. But... okay. I guess I am taking my medical advice from JPMorgan, Bloomberg, and Wapo now. Who knew?

    Also, I can't take seriously an article that compares this to the Irag war. That is an agenda. I also find it ironic that they lament the 100-200 thousand deaths from the war, but 100 thousand from Covid - no big woop.

    I understand conservatives think this a plot to weaken Trump. I think Trump is going to bring out Bidens long 30 year history of shipping our jobs to China and letting us become weak. Which is why I haven't made one post about Biden. Trump is just going to have that on a loop. So it really defy's logic what is going on right now. Like why do people care that some are wearing masks in a car. I don't. But it's their fucking personal car. Why the fuck do you care? Mind ya business.

    I can protect myself - you do you. Just let me know what the goal post is because it seems to keep moving. Right now it's -oh you can't count any of the cases. You can only count hospitalizations.

    Then hospitalizations go up. Then it's going to be - oh you can only count ICU's. As I've said - lets just stop counting.

    Everyone claims to be a libertarian these days - but that is a lie. Libertarians are suppose to believe that they should do no harm onto others and they do no harm onto you. People only care about ~their~ liberties. Not other peoples liberties. And that's pretty fucked up. I will continue to wear a mask and we will let Darwin decide.

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  7. Texas Refugee - I like your reading choices today. I think right now peoples general attitude is that they want to destroy others. There is no middle ground. Any slight and they will set your place on fire.

    Moonstone beach was the one that was too windy. I'm not sure I would love living at the beach. It always looks a little rough because the sea air eats houses.

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  8. I don't do NPR, I picked that up from someone surprised that NPR would weigh in on the virus on that side. NPR has an agenda, I thought everybody knew that...
    Actually I think they brought the war hoax (and it's dead) up to put this virus into a hoax context.
    The dead from this? A bad flu season to a really bad flu season if you check the numbers for world wide dead. Hard to find good numbers for the 2017-2018 flu season but the pandemics of '57 & '68 are easy to find.

    All that said I don't goal out much, I wash my hands after I do & have a bottle of 91% drug store alcohol in the car just because. I wear a face mast too.

    History says this isn't too bad. The 24/7 news says we're all going to die and they closed down 1/4 of the workforce and passed out trillions of dollars...
    Then the day after some cop in Minneapolis slowly murders a black guy just because he could and does it on video, pallets of bricks show up in cities all over that country.

    -Shrug- Something is happening, I don't know what...

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  9. I have to learn to proof read....

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  10. Capital of Texas RefugeeThursday, June 18, 2020 1:05:00 AM

    "I think right now peoples general attitude is that they want to destroy others. There is no middle ground. Any slight and they will set your place on fire."

    The "Kick Me" game seems to be popular right now.

    And also "Cops and Robbers", because of course they love to play that game with each other.

    "Games people play
    Night or day they're just not matchin'
    What they should do
    Keeps me feelin' blue ..."


    That slowness in the song's the feeling of the passage of an era, BTW.

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  11. "A bad flu season to a really bad flu season if you check the numbers for world wide dead. Hard to find good numbers for the 2017-2018 flu season but the pandemics of '57 & '68 are easy to find."

    I think we are past a "bad" flu season. In 2018 they reported 80 thousand deaths and the CDC claims that was the highest number in 40 years. We now are at a "bad" flu season plus every car crash death in America. Which is roughly 36 thousand people.

    Flu stats per the CDC. HERE.

    HERE.

    So far it HAS been less deadly than thought, but even people who don't die are left with long lasting medical conditions. They are even doing lung transplants on some people because their lungs are so damaged.

    "The 24/7 news says we're all going to die and they closed down 1/4 of the workforce and passed out trillions of dollars...

    I am not happy about this ~AT ALL~. I didn't like it when Obama was doing it and I hate it more now. I'm a fiscal conservative but I'm mostly libertarian.. But what are you going to say? The alternative is much worse.

    Everyone can criticize the shutdown, but what were they suppose to do when the images coming in from all other countries were terrifying? Companies have a moral and financial obligation to keep workers and customers safe.If they didn't people would be creaming about that. Lots of places are being sued right now for unsafe workplaces due to outbreaks. It's very difficult to strike the proper balance. And this whole hoax thing is just not helpful. People who refuse to wear masks are basically holding us hostage and making the lockdown last longer.

    As I said, Americans refuse to do the hard work needed to get past this. But obviously we can't stay locked down forever. Now we just get to accept the consequences full force. It's true hospitals were not overwhelmed, but it doesn't take that much of a surge to change that. And the legion of Jenny McArthy's are decidedly not helping. But everyone makes choices in life. Let's hope they don't sue everyone out of existence.

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  12. Capital of Texas RefugeeThursday, June 18, 2020 7:34:00 PM

    "Now we just get to accept the consequences full force."

    What is this we you speak of, White girl? :-)

    When has that ever happened, not only in America but also anywhere else?

    Mais ce n'est pas obligatoire to avoid mentioning Zee War and Zee Germans, but since Social Jerkoffs & Wankers want to redact history, I have a very fitting example.

    Did Nazi Germany accept full consequences for war debts and hyper-inflation, or did the Reich decide that a policy of expansive war worked better for building the economy and ignoring their previous war debts until they were stopped by the Allies?

    Have any group of people really accepted "consequences" or "responsibility" for any deep economic failures except in their aftermath as externally imposed events over which they no longer have any form of control?

    Why do you think such a book as Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" exists except as an epitaph for various economic and social failings that were dead and buried long before?

    So Americans are not the "exceptional exception" here, they're the norm across history when it comes to this particular matter.

    Nobody accepts the "consequences" or "responsibility" until reality forces the matter, and even then these people may not accept a measure of blame as being complicit with the forces that led to the imposition of stark reality.

    The US Government certainly doesn't accept the concept of people being forced out because of abusive tax policy, because otherwise there wouldn't be an IRC 877 thing to deal with on the way out.

    In fact, there wouldn't be a need to deal with anything on the way out, because if the entire tax structure were residency based, the number of people looking for the door would drop off substantially.

    So I will accept the potentiality for this idea of yours when Americans accept the potentiality for behaving like bullies to each other as well as to other groups of people ...

    I'd say that the massive US Government debt, the not-as-large but still significant US state debts, and the whopper of unfunded liabilities that outclass both are ample evidence that the last thing that Americans really desire to do is to consider "consequences" or "responsibility".

    Instead, it's really good evidence that Americans have managed to evade such things for decades, if not centuries.

    While it's tempting for some people to say that The Boomers deserve their savage economic beatings because of rigging the game along with The Silent Generation, when did the US Government debt explode along with everything else?

    During the O'Bozo administration as well as after it.

    OMG CONSEQUENCES ARE COMING
    WE MUST DOUBLE DOWN ON PREVENTIVE CONSEQUENCES

    :-)

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