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I doubt there is much concern about this.

There are no words

Edit:

Re: your 1200 bucks,

The debt collector gets first dibs

Edit 2:

Another Biden/Trump pillow fight.

Well, Covid sure changes a lot of stuff.

Saturday morning, I shut down the plant, like I do every week. Around 2:30 or 3:00 I started getting a hellacious headache. At 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning, you can't just call someone up, tell them "I don't feel well, I'm going home." I finished my job, then went home.

Over the weekend, I felt better, then worse, then better, then worse. Monday, felt alright most of the day. Got my sleep Monday afternoon, got up early evening, and damn if I didn't have to go worship at the porcelain throne.

Called in to work for a sick day. Now what? Drive all the way to Texarkana to the emergency room? The hell with that, that's where I'll catch the covid! So I lay around the house all night, feeling guilty for not going to work, and continuing to feel better, then worse.

Go to the clinic when it opens.

First thing, one of the ladies greets me at the entrance, and takes my temperature. That's never happened before! Strange, but yes, I understand.

Next thing, there's a little "X" marked with tape on the floor, in front of the receptionist's window. Oh-kay, I can go along with that, I remain at a long arm's distance from the receptionist, so we're not breathing on each other.

Here, I note that there are few people in the waiting room. Hope they're not all dead of corona virus! There are almost always half a dozen or more patients, often times with kids in tow. Today, it's just me, and one old lady.

Information, and initial screening done, I'm asked to sit in a specific section of the waiting room, far away from that old lady.

Ten minutes, and I'm called into a treatment room. The treatment room has changed - the computer is gone, most equipment is gone, there's just the examination bench, patient's chair, and nurse's stool. Lisa comes in, introduces herself, pulls a trolley in behind her with pressure cuff, thermometer, etc. Still no computer, instead, she writes vitals on the paper that pulls down over the examination table. Note, at no point has Lisa touched me. She manages to do it all without actually touching me with her hands, which are covered with latex gloves anyway.

Lisa leaves, and in comes a nurse, completely dressed out in a medical hazard suit. "My name is Beth, and I'm going to take swabs, to test you for the flu, and for strep throat." Sorry, I laughed. Told her, "I know it's not funny, but it's kinda nice to see someone else dressed out for a change!" I had to explain about electrical hazard suits, which are much bulkier, and almost assuredly more uncomfortable than the med suit. Not to mention much hotter, because I don't wear that thing in air conditioned spaces.

So, Beth sticks a swab down my throat until I gag. Another swab up each nostril until I'm about to scream. She leaves, and about 1/4 hour comes back to inform me that yes, I have both the flu, and strep throat. Beth asks me to drop my trousers, and pokes me with two needles. She is undeterred by my reminder that I'm allergic to needles. Some women are just mean, I guess.

Beth leaves, and Doc Martin comes in. Doc isn't dressed out, but like Lisa, she never touches me. She gives me two prescriptions, and I ask about the headache. She adds a script for cough syrup with codeine in it. From experience, codeine sounds like the right thing - moderately effective, which is better than most over-the-counter pain pills. Doc asks me to look up at the ceiling, close my eyes, and she sprays me down with some disinfectant, and we each leave the examination room.

Return to the receptionist, who tells me that I owe $25 copay. I inform her that I think I owe $30 already, she checks, and informs me that I only owe $15 from a previous visit, so the total is $40 and some change.

Out the door I go, and to the pharmacy. I could have walked up to the counter while still inside, but there's a note on the counter that the drive-thru is preferred, so that patients don't share breathing space with the druggists.

"This will take ten to fifteen minutes, Mr. Runaway, can you come back in a little while?"

Go sit in the sun for awhile, come back in fifteen, and sure enough, it's ready.

Oh, I'm off work for a week, quarantined to the house, AND, the company is paying me just like I'm at work. I have an email conversation in which HR repeatedly assures me that I will be paid, and they do NOT want me to return to work before I'm cured.

Hope none of you gets a contagious illness, but if you do, maybe you know what to expect now. Nothing shocking, it's all common sense, really. But things are different now!

Oh, I forgot one thing. Beth assured me that if she needed to do a swab for covid, it would be much worse than her swab for the flu. I've heard that they dig around with that swab really deep, trying to get a bit of your brain on the swab. Uggh.

Stay safe everyone, and try to avoid the doctor's office!!

Half of hospital capacity in my shut down state remains vacant, and medical facilities are receiving government bailouts. Shade is being thrown on antibody tests as unreliable and non-FDA reviewed. But the PCR COVID-19 tests that led to the current shut down were also rushed through.

Nursing homes are reporting large numbers of fatalities. Maybe they are using this time (when the FBI is unlikely to come knocking) to clear the books of residents who died previously but were generating income. People are blase about defrauding the government and see it as a near victimless crime. Why fill out a death certificate and stop the monthly retirement & subsidy checks? Are there reliable inspections of resident lists at long-term care facilities? Is the much-touted high Mediterranean life expectancy actually a benefits scam?

Today I was introduce to Existential Comics via Scooby-Doo and the Case of the Missing Landlords.

The inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world, indeed.

One of the large motivations for Adam Smith writing The Wealth of Nations was to convince people to try to move capital away from the unproductive landlords (who at that time were mostly comprised of very wealthy landed English gentry) into the hands of entrepreneurs and workers. He noticed two things about landlords, first, as he puts it "The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth."

There you have it from the horse's mouth: Adam Smith was a pinko commie, an undemocratic Marxist and would probably be a Remoaner had he been alive today.

Sanders endorses Biden

*shamelessly stolen

Virus-Panicked Liberal Gun Buyers Are Getting Angry When They Discover Their Own Gun Control Laws

Posted at 1:15 pm on April 10, 2020 by Kira Davis

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently and the topic of gun sales came up. My friend’s father owns a gun range near me and she said he’s seen a huge amount of liberals coming in to purchase weapons in recent weeks.

How does he know they’re liberals?

“They’re shocked to discover they can’t just walk out of the store with a gun.”

We’ve all heard about gun sales skyrocketing recently, but I hadn’t considered some of the tangential effects of the phenomenon until I spoke to my friend. Not only are many liberals suddenly learning to love their Second Amendment rights, many of them are finding out that the gun control narrative in this country — as repeated loudly and often by Hollywood and the mainstream media — is a complete lie.

So, I contacted my friend’s father to ask about what he is seeing personally at his own range these days. Gregg Bouslog runs On-Target Indoor Shooting Range in Laguna Niguel, CA. It’s where I taught my son to shoot and where I’ll teach my daughter once the chaos lifts. He says that while others are stuck at home while the economy grinds to a halt, he’s been working nonstop at the range as the applications for background checks and permits are stacking up daily. Bouslog claims he hasn’t done business like this since the days of Obama.

        As the owner of an indoor shooting range and gun store here in California these past 14 years we have never experienced such a huge demand for firearms and ammunition – even higher than the famous Obama rush of 2012/2013.

While it’s nice to see some businesses flourishing in these scary times, Bouslog says that safety has been a huge issue at the range, as many first-time buyers seem to have gotten all of their notions about guns and gun safety from television.

        We tried to look at just who the new firearm purchasers were and we believe that more than 60% of these individuals were first time buyers. I can’t describe the amount of fear in my staff as we had the buyers show proof of safe handling as part of the purchase process as required by law. You have never seen so many barrels pointed at sales staff and other customers. It was truly frightening. We had to keep stopping the process to give quick safety lessons. We are adding many more basic classes in the coming weeks and encouraged these buyers to please attend. We hope they do.

This isn’t hard to believe. As a gun-owner who formerly abhorred the Second Amendment, I can personally testify to the fact that most people who believe they are anti-gun are actually just anti-stupid. They just don’t realize they’re projecting their own stupidity onto law-abiding gun owners. They imagine that we gun owners are just a bunch of yahoos out here combing our mullets, waving our guns around to look sexy while we look for anything or anyone to shoot at any time. They have no respect for the power of a weapon and treat them accordingly, which is what Bouslog is witnessing firsthand at his range. We gun owners, of course, take safety, care and precautions quite seriously. These are ingrained in the culture of gun ownership.

While the safety of the employees at the range is a very serious matter, the most amusing and annoying part for the staff has been watching these first-time buyers discover just how stringent gun laws in California really are, including one of our newest laws requiring background checks before buying ammunition. Bouslog says it’s a bridge too far for the people who have been told their whole lives that it’s easier to get a gun than an abortion.

        More than a dozen of these buyers (men and women) actually thought that since they filled out and signed everything, they could just walk out and go home with the firearm. Several actually said they saw how easy it was to buy a gun on TV and why did they have to fill out all these forms.

        The majority of these first timers lost their minds when we went through the Ammo Law requirements. Most used language not normally heard, even in a gun range. We pointed out that since no one working here voted for these laws, then maybe they might know someone who did. And, maybe they should go back and talk to those people and tell them to re-think their position on firearms – we were trying to be nice.

        Most were VERY vocal about why it takes 10 days minimum (sometimes longer if the DOJ is backed up) to take their property home with them. They ask why do I need to wait 10 days if I need the protection today or tomorrow? We pointed out again that no one working here voted in support of that law.

        They really went crazy when we told them that for each firearm they had to do the same amount of paperwork and they could only purchase ONE handgun every 30 days. Again, we didn’t [vote] for that law.

        We had people cuss at us and stomp out when we explained that secondary identification had to be part of the paperwork, as they felt insulted that what they had wasn’t good enough. We have a number of Yelp reviews calling us names and other things about how bad we are because of this whole new buyer rush

Again, I truly hope for the safety of those range employees in the face of so many uninformed and incurious first-time buyers. That being said, I find this whole situation fascinating. So many things in our economy and way of life are shifting monumentally these days. Could the gun control battle be one of them?

I discovered the idiocy of my anti-gun beliefs once I decided to learn about them firsthand. The Hollywood mystique immediately fell away and I was imbued with a new respect for weaponry and the people who dedicate their lives to weapons safety and serving and protecting the Second Amendment. You can’t know how bonkers our gun control laws are until you go try to buy one yourself.

There are a lot of people like me out there right now — first-timers and Second Amendment haters who feel like a hypocrite for wanting a gun for protection. Like I did, now they are navigating our convoluted gun laws for themselves and discovering that it is just not possible to walk into a store, buy a gun and leave with it in your pocket.

As these revelations begin to spread among our liberal brethren in the state of California, will we see a shift in gun laws and support for anti-Second Amendment legislators? Only time will tell, but it will surely be an interesting question to ponder in the coming months and years.

*Special thanks to Gregg Bouslog of On-Target Indoor Shooting Range in Laguna Niguel, CA for sharing his experience with us.

The average age of senators being over 60 years old, it might be time to rethink who we are electing. Maybe we should elect younger people to the house and senate. Young people's problems get ignored because politicians are old bastards. That's why most of the tax money goes to benefit rich old folks, themselves. Whereas student loan debt and other "young people problems" get ignored.

Time to consider, should age be a factor in who we elect? Should we consciously choose to elect younger politicians? I vote yes.

Many years ago, when I didn't have much money, I bought an entry-level nVidia graphics card (I think made by ASUS). It was a 9400GT. The reason I bought it was that I wanted something that could run CUDA code and it was the very lowest spec. that would, and it has crunched many a SETI@Home work unit.

Today I upgraded one of my old Frankenstein machines to Slackware-current. It's an intel Core-2 Quad with 6GB of RAM and that old nVidia graphics card in it. I thought it was time that Turgid jr. installed an OS, so I got today's Slackware-current (64-bit) and burned it to DVD and guided him through the installation. It worked first time.

Now we are on Linux 5.4.31 and gcc 9.3.0. I've already had it find some bugs in some old code I had lying aroung. I must say that gcc becomes better and better at doing what a static analysis tool would have done in the past.

Anyway, to my point: I went to compile the nVidia proprietary driver for the old graphics card. It seems that gcc-9.3.0 finds too many problems with it. Never mind, because nVidia have a very new driver (December 2019) for my very old and cheap GeForce 9400GT which compiles and runs flawlessly.

Thanks, nVidia. I've been buying your cards since the first beta Linux driver in 1999 and they've always worked.

And who recovered? No one asked.

So we roamed, with our hellish pills,

Among the valleys and the hills,

Worse than the pestilence itself we were.

I’ve poisoned a thousand: that’s quite clear:

And now from the withered old must hear

How men praise a shameless murderer.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Feds Warn Alex Jones to Stop Hawking Coronavirus Scams
The FDA sent a letter to the infamous conspiracy theorist on Thursday saying he needed to stop pushing colloidal silver as a therapy for COVID-19

The Food and Drug Administration is demanding that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones stop advertising dubious dietary supplements as coronavirus treatments and threatening legal action if he doesn’t comply.

The FDA sent a letter to Jones and his website InfoWars on Thursday demanding that he stop telling the viewers of his popular internet broadcasts that they can ward off the virus with colloidal silver products sold on his website. Those videos, the FDA wrote, “misleadingly represent them as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”

A failure to remove those claims, the agency added, “may result in legal action seeking a Federal District Court injunction and an order may require that you pay back money to consumers.”

Jones, who is famous for fabricating conspiracy theories and marketing dubious health supplements, has been hawking supposed coronavirus-killing colloidal silver products in videos with titles like “Deep State Using Coronavirus Fear and Panic To Destroy Our Country.” In one video posted last month, he told viewers of his ”Nano Silver” supplements: “the Pentagon has come out and documented, and homeland security have said this stuff kills the whole SARS corona family, at point blank range.”

[ . . . . ] Despite Jones’ on-air claims to the contrary, language on InfoWars’ online marketplace explicitly states that its colloidal silver products are not designed to treat the virus. “The products on this site are not intended for use in the cure, treatment, prevention or mitigation of any disease, including the novel coronavirus,” the website warns. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and is expressly disavowed.”

Jones and InfoWars were also targeted by authorities in New York last month over his claims about the products’ ability to ward off the coronavirus. The state’s attorney general sent InfoWars a cease and desist letter demanding it stop airing dubious claims about its products’ health benefits.

I seem to recall that Jim Bakker was similarly threatened, then arrested for similar claims about the same bogus cure. Unlike Alex Jokes, at least Bakker could say that spreading this kind of misinformation to his followers was the christian thing to do.

Another source: FDA warns Alex Jones over false coronavirus claims