Masks and Parachutes

So the latest anti-mask argument making the rounds is: there's no point in wearing them because any suggestion that wearing masks reduces the transmission of certain airborne contagions is "not validated by any study." Which, so far as I know, is true (at least, I haven't looked for any). And here is something else not validated by any study: there has never, not once, been a scientifically rigorous double-blind study testing whether parachutes are effective at reducing fatalities among people who jump out of airplanes. There exists nary a single peer-reviewed study any pro-parachutists could link to, showing people with parachutes do any better than a parachute-free control group. 

Clearly, then, the only logical, rational conclusion is that parachutes are worthless -- or, at most, are only useful for identifying the cowardly sheeple amongst the skydiving set, eh?

Florida's Running Out of ICU Beds

Here's a Newsweek article published yesterday, June 18, headlined “Multiple Florida Hospitals Run out of ICU Beds as Coronavirus Cases Spike.”

As Florida health officials report another record single-day increase in cases of the novel coronavirus, new data shows hospitals across the state have filled most or all available beds in their respective intensive care units.

Numerous Florida medical facilities reported dwindling ICU bed availability on Thursday, with several reporting no availability at all, according to the latest report published by Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). Palm Beach County was among those statewide regions where the availability of beds was most scarce. An accompanying report from AHCA shows about 75 percent of available hospital beds statewide are currently occupied.

The AHCA's data showed two of Palm Beach County's 17 hospitals have already filled all ICU beds, while several other medical centers reported limited availability. One hospital in Miami-Dade County has also reached its ICU bed capacity as of Thursday, and the majority of hospitals have filled more than half of beds in intensive care units. Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties have reported two of Florida's most severe local virus outbreaks....

What's particularly frustrating is that when the quarantines and lockdowns (such as they were) began last March, they were never a case of “We'll do this for a little while, and the problem'll go away”; they were supposed to buy us time to arrange for testing, contact tracing and similar things to allow us to (cautiously) re-open in a safe manner, until such time as a vaccine is developed. But almost none of that has been done, and the OneSimpleTrick (TM) that could enable most people to resume most activities (with certain precautions) -- wearing a mask in public -- is being decried by Trumpster-types as America's greatest human-rights violation since those evil damnyankees forced the noble Confederates to give up their slaves.

Where the coronavirus is concerned, the only thing that's changed since March is a much higher number of people it's killed (currently at 121,269 dead in the US alone, according to Worldometers). Our immune systems remain the same, the virus remains the same, and there's still no vaccine for it.

IPMS (Insufficient Pessimistic-Misanthropy Syndrome)

All this time I considered myself a reasonably healthy individual, when it turns out I've had a severe and apparently permanent case of IPMS (Insufficient Pessimistic-Misanthropy Syndrome).

For all my dismay over how thoroughly partisanship and the “sports bar/go-team-go” mentality has corrupted American political discourse (going all the way back to the end of Bush/beginning of Obama years, when various breeds of Democrat and Republican flipped positions on civil-liberty and government-authority matters alongside the POTUS' changing party membership), and for all the ways I feared "Even by post-2001 standards, Trump's presidency is going to be very very bad for America; Zod forbid we have anything like a 9/11-level catastrophe on his watch," in both cases I was insufficiently pessimistic, and weighed down by too much faith in humanity (or at least the subset of humanity comprising my fellow Americans).

I never thought to add “worst pandemic in a century” to the list of “potential American disasters, 2017-2021, exacerbated by a President Trump.” Even if I had, I don't recall ever considering "partisan sports-barism will get so bad that even amidst the worst pandemic in a century, the simple act of wearing a face mask or not becomes an actual socio-political symbol." Nor did I expect an appallingly high number of self-described liberty advocates to commence sneering at mask-wearers on the apparent grounds that “Basic self-care, let alone basic concern for others, are both anti-liberty principles”--best exemplified by Jeffrey Tucker's infamous tweet “Adding to my post-lockdown predictions: the face mask will be rightly regarded as a symbol of obsequious obedience and grotesque compliance with arbitrary and ignorant authority.”

Yet even if I had been sufficiently misanthropic and pessimistic to foresee and prepare for all this, I still did not expect “Amidst the worst pandemic in a century, rampaging American cops will still disregard social-distancing procedures if that's what it takes to murder harmless people.” (Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin certainly didn't bother wearing a face mask while he used George Floyd's neck as a kneeling bench. At least I don't think he did; I could not bear to watch Floyd's murder all the way through. If Chauvin did mask up anytime during those nine or ten minutes, )

And all across America, people peacefully protesting Floyd's death (and police brutality in general) have been met by police officers perversely determined to illustrate exactly why people are protesting.This is how American police behave when they know their actions are being recorded and broadcast to the world. Imagine what they do when they think nobody's watching.

Chauvin's callous killing of George Floyd wasn't the first time, nor even the dozenth time, America has seen undeniable video proof of a cop abusing if not outright murdering someone. (And that's just killings caught on video; consider the far greater numbers of people who died in police custody under deeply suspicious circumstances, but their actual deaths weren't recorded.)

Even worse, in many cases police officers who do these things aren't even charged with crimes, they keep their jobs and their pensions . Many times they even get to keep their jobs and pensions. Police unions overwhelmingly cover for abusive cops – the union's criticism of Chauvin was notable precisely because he was one of the rare times when cop unions did NOT overwhelmingly converge into a blue wall of silence.

My IPMS is flaring up again, because despite the surreal horror of these past three months, I find myself feeling … “optimistic” is far too strong a word, but perhaps “hopeful” works instead. Since the dawn of the smartphone era – more precisely, the dawn of the “practically everybody has a camera and video-recording ability nowadays, plus the ability to post this on the internet” era – “video shows American cop killing in cold blood” has practically become its own genre of reality show.

But maybe this time will be different. It's been over a week now since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin suffocated George Floyd to death, and the protests are still ongoing. More importantly, get-out-the-vote efforts are developing in response. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court might possibly reconsider the vile doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which basically grants on-the-clock police officers the legal right to abuse people, with no means of legal recourse for their victims.

My country's heading for hell so fast it's leaving the proverbial handbasket in the dust. IPMS kept me from ever seeing it coming … and my IPMS keeps me hoping maybe, somehow, this is the start of something which will change America for the better, even more profoundly than did the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.