If we lived longer, and paid better attention to the world around us, most of us would go “Meh. Another day, another “crisis”… Not gonna panic.”.

Instead, we rely on things like the media to tell when “things are really, truly important…”, and that’s a huge ‘effing mistake, because the people running media in general are fucking idiots, the people who couldn’t hack the course of study for things like advanced degrees in Education. They are morons, preening narcissists who know nothing. There are a few working in the ranks who know things, but they are so few and far between that they can be safely dismissed as being part of the general herd.

If you’ve dug through the primary sources about things like the Spanish Influenza Epidemic, and read the actual contemporaneous news stories, you’d look at today’s blathering as being of a similar sort of useless panic-mongering. Nobody has any perspective on this crap at all, and I guarantee you that by the end of the day, when you break it all out, COVID-19 is probably going to be more lethal due to the number of delayed surgeries and hospitalizations taking place for other issues. How many stents aren’t being put in, how many other correctives are being held off due to “hospital crowding”?

We don’t experience the world the same way as those resident to the 1918 epidemic, when you simply put your head down and went to work every day, knowing you might die from a poorly-understood disease. Today, modern medicine has insulated us from reality, and here we are: Something like COVID-19, which would have been the merest blip on the radar many generations ago, is now a world-shattering crisis. Mark my words, on this: End of the “pandemic”, we’re going to see that there was a minor rise in the death rate, at most, and that what will probably kill more people will be the side-effects from trying to deal with everything.

I’ll also lay money on this being less a respiratory thing, and more an issue with hypoxia due to the damage done to oxygen transport mechanisms, showing that the people put on ventilation are probably being killed by that causing more damage to the lungs than anything else. Supplemental oxygen, yes; forced-air ventilation? Oh, hell no. That is, I think, what is killing more people than anything else, because it drives the lungs to destruction and deep pnuemonia. If you get this crap, and wind up hospitalized for it, make damn sure that you understand the risks and that going on ventilation will actually help, in your case.

Every ten years or so the world is coming to an end. To me, change is only proof that time has not stopped.

Spring is in the air. So is panic.

G*dd*mn that was fun to read.

Strictly, I think esteem and respect have overlapping meanings, but my dad always found them sufficiently different concepts that for him, and how he put it to me, was that a person should strive for self-respect and the self-respect of others, both mostly to be earned with little otherwise due, even from oneself, whereas esteem could only be directed at another, and only if they earned it from you. ‘Self-esteem’, meant to him an unearned version of self respect, a concept to be denigrated at all times. I’m not sure he used these words correctly, but this framing lives on in my mind whenever I hear the term ‘self-esteem’.

Resilience strikes me as a good concept for nations or individuals, but it’s slippery. And situational.

Consider. My employer and country at large is devoting a lot of discussion time to the mental health implications of COVID. For me, if you’ve got something that could potentially put in something as horrible as intubation/ventilator, with fatality or long-term disability a real possibility, that’s a casue for fear. All will confront it in their own ways. I would rather avoid it. Same if you’ve got a loved one with it.

If you’ve got some other ailment for which you now can’t get timely care, or which would increase your COVID exposure. If, like me, you have a couple of moderate comborbities.

Or if you have lost a job and have serious financial/food/housing problems coming on fast.

All those are reasons for stress effects on mental health. I’m on watch for them myself. I’ve had some experience.

But we’ve got mental health discussions centred on the idea that the existence of COVID itself is such a mental shock to the worldview, or that mere social distancing or isolation are such demanding practices, that everyone is going to have a breakdown.

I’m not sure what level resilience that is. I’m still more worried about my physical health than my mental health in all this. I must be nuts.

The problem with all this crap, and crap is exactly what it is, is that you simply cannot do the experiments and studies that you would need to be able to do in order to actually validate the ideas these things are trying to test and describe. Not even the Nazis had the time or the ruthlessness (not to mention the lack of self-delusion) to actually do meaningful work in these areas, and as such… It’s all so much fatuous bullshit thought up by grad students and professors over their beer.

I’m sure there’s something to some of this, but there’s no damn way to tell for sure with the experiments and studies they’ve done. They’re looking at what amounts to a pico-second wide slice of human existence, and trying to extrapolate out to the entire species from what they think they’ve seen. You want to get solid answers in this arena, you’ll need to have the power to run utterly ruthless experiments with twins that would likely lead to the ethics committee of even the most progressive institutions in the world burning your labs to the ground and salting the site with Cobalt-60. Not even the Nazis or the Communists ever had to will to run stuff like this, which would make Mengele and the chaps who ran Unit 731 look at you like you were a mentally diseased maniac.

Either that, or you’re going to have to run generations-long longitudinal studies that would last longer than even the most successful civilizations we’ve managed to put together so far. Which ain’t happening in the current system. Those guys trying to figure out how to communicate radiation hazard to cultures ten thousand years from now would have to be pikers next to the ones trying to prove some of this crap they’re talking about here isn’t simply statistical noise.

The trouble with growing up in a dysfunctional family is there are no handy positive role models.

The good news is a smart kid can learn things without being taught. You learn the hard way, by trial and error. An awkward kid in a bad family seems like he’s cursed twice over, but his awkwardness may simply be experimentation, a desperate search for the right formula.