Ruth

Categories Rants

Is this how you want to live?

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Ok, my bias on the subject of the C19 response has been pretty obvious. But regardless of whether you agree with me, and especially if you don’t:

Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life?

You’ve allowed yourself to be terrorized into hiding your face, hiding inside your house. Minimizing, or even completely stopping, in person contact. You stopped exercising except for what you could do at home. As a result your health has deteriorated further than it was before. Your weight has gone up. Your joints object to serious work even worse than before. Your mental health has deteriorated. You have massive adrenal fatigue from the constant fear.

You’ve not seen some of your family members in person since March 2020. Maybe you even don’t even talk to them anymore because they didn’t agree with you on the seriousness of C19.

You panic and back away at the sight of an unmasked face. You can’t understand how someone who has other health concerns could be willing to risk going out in public, especially unmasked!

You catch a cold, the flu, or even the dreaded C19, despite your best efforts and decide its obviously the fault of that unmasked person you saw the other day.

Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life? Cause that constant fear alone is by god miserable. You’re missing out on family get togethers, hugs, meeting the new baby, birthday parties. You’re hurting your long term health prospects out of fear you might catch C19.

Life is risks. And I assume the reason you’re trying to avoid C19 is to live longer. But is it really worth it if you take away all of that? For however long the rest of your life may be?

If you found out you had an inoperable condition that WOULD kill you in 30 days, what would be more important? Huddling away from life in fear you might get sick and shorten that 30 days? Or being able to go to your final rest knowing you made the most of the time you had?

You never know whats going to happen.

A stroke or a heart attack could happen to just about anyone at any time. Car in the next lane spins out on the ice.

Sure would suck to die where the last years of your life you were voluntarily having hid away in terror of a respiratory virus, instead of doing all the things you wanted to do.

Or maybe it’ll be a relief, cause now you won’t miss it any more.

Categories Rants

Getting sick is not a moral failing

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A family member is all upset, her husband came down sick with covid.

CLEARLY this is the fault of some un-masked person who dared go out in public!

Meanwhile I’m here reading her description of how he was sick with a scratchy throat for less than a week and had a low grade fever (less than 100) for 3 days and thinking to myself “nice! Not only did he get off light, he’s now got legit antibodies from the current strain to bolster his shots!”.

Its a respiratory virus for fucks sake! Not ebola! Not HIV!

Even the various sections of the .GOV have admitted that the shots don’t stop transmission. More and more data shows that anything short of a properly fitted N95 mask is damn near useless for stopping virus transmission. And I swear to god the CDC keeps coming out with the stupidest research in trying to insist that masks work.

EVERYONE is going to get it. Just like the flu. Once it spread beyond that first town in where-ever (regardless of the actual source) it was never going to be possible to stop it. Infact, getting it now, when you’re recently vax’d, boostered, AND most likely to be exposed to the Omicron variant (which is mild mild in comparison to the original), is probably the best way to get it and the antibodies that natural infection brings.

Meanwhile theres also a growing database of the damaging side affects of masking and isolation on the public in general and children in particular. Both the damage masking is doing to the wearer, and also to people who see mostly masked faces.

The constant restrictions have fucked the economy and the supply chain (world wide!) to the point where its going to take years to fix even if we could actually get everyone to STOP FUCKING WITH IT FURTHER today.

The .GOV went out of its way to suppress treatments and discussion of things that mitigate symptoms and severity while the media does their damndest to make it all look as bad and horrible as possible. We’re going to be generations fixing the damage done to the public’s trust in the health care system.

Just stop. Its a respiratory virus. Your chances of dying from it were never all that high, and they’ve continued to drop. Just stop for fucks sake.

Categories Supply chain

You only THOUGHT the supply chain was fucked so far

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Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe the things you need have always been in-stock so who really cares what the rest of the shelves look like. Or YOUR store is stocked. Who cares what the next county over looks like.

And to be fair, outside of the crazy panic during the initial shut down, the large majority of the shortages have varied ALOT from region to region and brand to brand.

So one store will have mass empty shelves. And practically next door another will be well enough stocked to appear fine.

Please note I said “appear fine”.

Cause they’re not. Some stores and companies are just better at improv stocking than others, happen to be lucky trucking wise, happen to be closer to a hub, or other such reasons why they’re doing better.

The Wegmans I usually shop at next to my work. Located on a busy shopping thruway in a reasonably affluent city. At 6pm on a Friday. Right off a major interstate for easy transport of product.

While these two sets of shelves were by far the worst in the store, there wasn’t a single set of shelves without multiple holes. And in most cases what they DID have was only enough for one or two deep.

And some of the shortages have been like that for weeks. Cereal hasn’t been fully stocked in at least 3 weeks. Peanut butter has looked like locusts hit those shelves for over a month. Pet food? Well, if you haven’t noticed the pet food shortage you probly don’t have a pet, cause THATS been just getting shorter and shorter for over a year now. Feminine sanitary supplies never did really recover from the shut down. Neither did vitamins and assorted similar type pills. The facial care aisle is starting to look seriously picked over, and hasn’t been fully stocked in a while. Canned soup actually looked pretty good yesterday, till I actually looked closer. The shelves had about 5 flavors of soup on them, a ton of cans of each, but I hope you’re not to picky about which kind. Milk, and milk products (including cream, half and half, and the like) have been short stocked every time I’ve been in there for the last 3 weeks, enough on the shelves that I didn’t have to walk away empty handed, but no where near as full as normal. Last week when I got my order of meat from the local wholesaler they warned me that the price list for the next week had some major price increases on it, and they’ve been warned that more things are going to be out of stock and short.

And its about to get worse.

Cross Border Trucker Protest Continues, LINK, LINK, there’s been remarkably little major media attention to this inside the USA, but a few are starting to notice.

BNSF Railway workers, from the SMART-TD and BLET Unions may be about to strike. LINK, LINK, Newsweek actually picked that one up, but the general public doesn’t seem to have noticed it yet.

Take a deep breath and hold on tight folks.

animal feed shortages, link,

crop fertilizer shortages, link, link, link

Categories Bleg, Politics

Carhartt Vaccine Mandate–New Coat bleg

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Carhartt has decided that its vaccine mandate will stand, even though the OSHA mandate was put down by the Supreme Court. Link, Link, Link, Link.

Carhartt as a company certainly has the right to mandate what it wants it’s employees to do. I stand by their right to mandate the C19 vaccine if they so desire.

But I have really strong feelings about a mandate that forces people to get a medical procedure that hasn’t even completed its full testing regimen and in a different political climate wouldn’t even be FDA approved yet. So while I normally try to ignore a companies politics when shopping, this means that I won’t be buying any more Carhartt while that mandate is in place.

Which pisses me off, I love my Carhartt gear. It holds up to the abuse, and on the occasion there’s a problem with it they’ve helped. They’ve sent me, FOR FREE, replacement zipper pulls when a coat’s zipper pull broke. I love their stuff. I literally just bought new gloves from their local store a couple weeks ago, and have been haunting their website waiting for the coat I want in the size I want to come back into stock so I can replace my current one, which at 10+ years of abuse is finally showing its wear enough to need replacement.

So now I need a new winter work coat. I usually buy Carhartt’s Duck Canvas with the heavy quilted lining in mens XL. The combination of mens style and XL size means that while it fits me well enough to wear on its own, its also big enough to wear additional layers underneath if I need to, or to wear over my insulated overalls comfortably. I prefer the style that does NOT have elastic at the bottom, Carhartt calls that “Full Swing”.

I don’t suppose anyone knows of a comparable quality coat out there?

Categories 2021

Should I laugh or cry?

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Over the last 20 months people have been arguing about what is being done right or wrong in the pandemic response.

Over and over people have been labeled “conspiracy theorists” and “spreading misinformation” for stating something that went against the mainstream beliefs on the subject, been banned from social media, had family deride them, and in some cases had family disown them and friends disappear.

Only to have that same statement, months or a year later, be proved to have merit, or even be true, by the media and politicians.

And here we go again.

As recently as 6 months ago people were banned from social media for stating that cloth masks were not useful in stopping the C19 virus.

And yet, just this week, on CNN! Dr Leana Wen, one of CNN’s top talking heads about medical issues and the pandemic, stated that “cloth masks are little more than facial decoration“!

I’m waiting for Dr Wen to get canceled.

Oh wait, she’s one of the GOOD guys, so its ok when she says it.

Seriously though, if you’re counting on a mask to help protect you from the virus you need to be wearing a N95 mask. And you need to wear it properly, making sure there’s no gaps. If its fogging up your glasses when you breath its not fitted correctly.

Categories Nothing Much, Review

Compression socks

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A couple months ago the Physical Therapist I was seeing for foot/ankle problems informed me I needed to started wearing knee high compression socks at work, apparently part of the problems I was having was fluid buildup. She said that if budgetary constraints were an issue you can get cheap bulk packs on Amazon.

So I started with a cheap bulk pack. 6 pairs for $15. And, well, they helped with the fluid buildup, but were otherwise horrid to wear.

Poking around further, found a pack of 3 pairs for $20, and a another set where each pair was $15. Ordered a set of each. The pack of 3 was slightly more comfortable. The single pair more so.

I ordered a couple more pairs of the singles to tide me over, and went on a research binge on compression socks. There are compression socks out there that are $50/pair! Or MORE! Pass! But all reviews agreed, the more you were willing to spend on them the more likely they were to be comfortable.

Discovered that Bombas has compression socks. They’re not cheap, $25-$30 a pair, and they’re funky patterned.

Here’s the other thing, I normally wear plain white socks. I’m very OCD about making sure my socks match, not just in color, but in style, because if they don’t match they feel weird like I’m wearing miss-matched shoes, and it drives me nuts during the day. All my socks are white, except for a set that have colored toes, but at least the colored toes means I don’t get them mixed with my other white socks.

But if I’m going to be wearing compression socks they were going to be VERY visible when I’m wearing shorts at work. And I don’t really want to wear white knee highs with shorts at work where I inevitably get really dirty. And black would just make me hotter.

So I said hell with it and ordered a set of funky patterned Bombas socks.

Guys, they’re SO MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE than the cheaper socks. I actually feel like I’m wearing socks, not nylons (sometimes called knee high pantyhose if you prefer that term), which is what the cheap ones feel like, and which I hate.

Lesson learned. I ordered a bunch more on Black Friday weekend. The cheap ones will be donated to somewhere.

Weird bonus, matching the funky socks back up after laundry doesn’t bother me, maybe because they’re so easy to tell apart? Donno, but I’ll take it!

Categories 2021, Politics, Rants

The more overweight you are the worse Covid is

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I mean, we’ve known this practically since day 1. Overweight to obese people have been significantly more likely to get seriously sick and/or die from Covid-19 right from the start, even if they were otherwise healthy.

But instead of encouraging people to exercise and get more fit the .GOV scared people into hiding at home, shut down parks, beaches, play areas. Arrested people exercising alone or in household groups. Shut down gyms.

Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune cells within body fat, prompting a damaging defensive response in the body.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/health/covid-fat-obesity.html

Here’s a link to the actual study.

Instead of taking advantage of this to encourage people to get healthy the .GOV did their damndest to convince people to get sicker instead. Instead of making people healthier the .GOV scared them into huddling into small indoor spaces, spaces that might have well been designed to SPREAD respiratory disease. Forced them to avoid one of the very things that would make it less likely for them to get sick. And obesity has spiked hard during this whole mess. In both children and adults. Along with mental health problems. And its not getting better. Not to mention the damage done to immune systems by being terrified of sniffles.

People are STILL scared of being around other people. Terrified of being too close to other people while getting exercise that they NEED to stay healthy. So they’re choosing NOT to exercise, which in turn is making them more likely to get seriously sick from Covid. I see it every day on social media “I tried to go to the gym today but when I got to the gym there were more than X number of people there so I couldn’t stay away from people so I went home”.

The UK is looking at an expected 700,000+ extra cases of cancer JUST FROM MISSED APPOINTMENTS over the last two years. Because we terrified people into not going to the doctor, shut down “non-emergency” treatments, shut down urgent cares.

Everyones freaking out because people aren’t getting the Covid vaccine, and meanwhile children are missing out on their childhood shots because they weren’t able to get into the doctors offices for any one of those many reasons. Are we TRYING to get additional cases of measles? Cause it sure looks like it.

Deaths from TB are continuing to spike due to lack of treatment in the 2020 shutdown. Malaria.

And the .GOV is STILL freaking out at every rise in cases, regardless of actual hospitalization increase numbers. And at the same time is taking steps to REDUCE hospital bed availability across the country. Millions and millions sent to every state for “Covid relief” and how much of it went towards increasing hospital bed availability and nurse/doctor availability?

But on no, we have to shut down “elective” procedures, we have to spread out the number of patients seen in a day, we have to……resulting in people not being able to get treatment for cancers, heart problems, joint repairs….anything that is “scheduled ahead of time” rather than “has to be done right now to save a life” is considered elective. And yet here we are again, killing more people cause god forbid we chance exposing them to a respiratory virus they’re going to get ANYWAY at some point in their life.