3/22/2020

Thoughts On A Sunday

Here we are, yet another week into dealing with coronavirus. The number of confirmed cases is increasing as expected. (More tests means more infections being detected, even those that show little or no symptoms.) The media is still sensationalizing rather than actually reporting the news, still trying to blame President Trump for everything, and scaring folks for no other reason than they can.

Most of the folks up here are taking it with little fear or trepidation. Other than the initial surge of panic buying of paper towel and hand sanitizer, things have pretty much settled down. There have been a few spot shortages here and there (Half-and-Half and Jello being two of them for no reason I can determine), but I haven’t come across anything that is truly in short supply. Some of the local supermarkets are instituting special shopping hours for their elderly customers to help reduce the possibility of infection by Covid-19.

Local government is limiting access to town and city halls, with as much of the services provided as possible being shifted online in order to reduce person-to-person contact as much as is practical. Police and fire departments are closing access to the public from their facilities, trying to move as many of their non-emergency services as possible online and telephone.

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Is China’s claim of coronavirus recovery fake? Knowing how the Chinese government has prevaricated about coronavirus since the beginning, can we believe it now?

A supplier for my company located in Wuhan has been telling a different story than the ‘official’ story from the Chinese government.

I am more inclined to believe our supplier as they are on the scene.

UPDATE: It seems the reason why there are have been no more cases of Covid-19 reported in China is because China is reportedly no longer testing for it.

No testing, no reports.

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I’ve stated more than once that the push away from ‘single-use’ plastic shopping bags was a mistake considering they are less expensive, less impactful on the environment, are actually reused in a number of ways, and are less likely to spread disease than reusable “sustainable” cloth totes. Banning of single-use plastic bags is based more on virtue signaling than being environmentally responsible and may be responsible for helping spread Covid-19.

As the government, businesses, and individuals move to slow Wuhan coronavirus’ spread, one of the environmentalists’ pet “green” projects is under threat. Many municipalities and states banned single-use plastic bags due to heavy lobbying by those who insist that officials replace them with germ- and bacteria-laden reusable shopping bags.

That seems to be changing, much to environmentalists’ dissatisfaction, in the face of the Wuhan coronavirus. Because the virus can survive on such items and thus spread infection, many plastic bag bans are being delayed or lifted to shut down the petri dish of contagion these reusable shopping bags represent.

Science and knowledge about disease and contagion must take second place to the watermelon environmentalist narrative. That the reusable bags can spread disease and death is not seen as a bug, but as a feature by the purported environmentalists. Anything that cuts down the human population is seen as a plus by a lot of these folks.

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There is one thing that is more shocking than the coronavirus and it has shaken many of us to the core.

Tom Brady signed a two-year $60 million contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. There is also a $9 million performance incentive to go with it, and a promise to rename the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as the Tom Brady Buccaneers.

(OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating. It might have been only a $6 million performance incentive.)

Needless to say, a number of tears of anguish were shed in New England. The end of an era has come.

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This sounds like a good idea whose time has come.

It’s time for an open source project to review “all the laws which have proven themselves unnecessary.”

My home state had something called a Sunset Commission that reviewed all existing laws and regulations and made a list of those which either no longer served a purpose or caused more problems than they solved. Quite often the legislature would repeal the redundant ones and repeal or modify the problematic ones. Unfortunately a Democrat governor convinced the state legislature in the late 70’s/early 80’s that it was no longer needed and it was itself “sunsetted”, a mistake we’ve been paying for ever since.

It’s time to bring it back to New Hampshire and to bring it to life at the federal level.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice is breaking up, discussions and preparations are already being made for the coming boating season, and where we expect commuting traffic is going to be pretty sparse for a while.