https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b987jvUE8Gc
What’s the difference between you and me? Like Dre said, move units then talk shit and we can do this.
They’re is a difference between these three things. That’s not medicine, that’s science. Many doctors are also incredible scientists. Some are not. But science is not the doctor’s primary job. The doctor’s primary job is to care for the patient, and use science to increase comfort and increase life. That’s an important job. But it’s not science. Science is the clear delineation on what makes a case of asthma, what makes a case of pneumonia, what makes a case of COVID. There are specific measurables that define each diseases. Does the x-ray indicate a bacterial infection? Does the application of a nebulizer decreases severity? Does the COVID test come back positive?
There is no question that medical doctors are not physical doctors. Physical doctors don’t need to adopt a bunch of dying people as marketplace version of their own children, and then be there for them shuffling from one mortal coil to the next. So yeah, maybe their science isn’t always top priority. Maybe some pneumonia deaths have been classified as COVID, if that test was positive, maybe some asthma and COPD deaths have been classified as COVID if that test was positive. It doesn’t matter. Worst case scenario, we waste a couple trillion dollars and we then learn things about epidemiology and infectious medicine that save lives for generations. We’ve gone into debt a shit-ton bigger than $2 trillion over wars, maybe, just this once, we’ll get a war debt not from blowing up brown people, or blowing up black people, maybe just this once, we’ll get a war debt from trying to save a bunch of old folks who have been dying of infection instead of dying of heart disease and extinction of social security benefits, as all good old folks are supposed to die. Debt form the Great Viral War of 2020 … pertineer gold in them hills.
In late 2021, we’ll know what actually happened, what categories lost, what categories gained, and we’ll figure it out the actual death surplus. Not an estimate, but the actual number. But all that has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with demographics. In the world, we have a bizarre situation where the most influential segments of society are no longer producing 2.5 kids. They’re producing 0.5 kids. If that. The elite are dying off apparently, and they aren’t willing to breed with us Contemporary Neanderthals. (Who used to make the joke that scientists have never actually found a female Neanderthal?) So they have to extend the lives of their own (and they might drag up a few of us dipshits to fix their lawn sprinkler system up on the space station).
And sure, for the $1.5 trillion that we’re eventually going to spend on this thing, we could have saved a lot of easy-to-save lives. But instead, we’re learning how to save hard-to-save lives. And in learning that, we’ll then figure out how to increase the efficacy of that, and then save some easy-to-save lives. I don’t know why the pharma industry does it this way, but it’s the way it’s done, I guess it’s mostly because the development costs of the medicines (in current climate, anti-virals) are high, and Developing Nations don’t have that kind of coin to pay off the high tech medicine. And drugs are expensive to make in compliance with the FDA’s rules. And the FDA rules are there for a reason, because the reversed chirality incident with Thalidomide ruined a lot of lives, cost a lot of lives, and forced everyone to get scientific about scientific process.
So there y’go, the thalidomide (why does my spell checker not flag the lower-case thalidomide, but it does flag chirality? HELLS TEETH MAN!) was a mess, but it led tom something wonderful. It led to rigidly controlled pharmaceuticals. They may not always work, they may not always fail, but they will not deviate from the published and accounted molecular structure, and now, those people in the New Poverty can have 0.5 kids as they support themselves on the gig economy and move through life without health insurance or retirement. And if Social Security manages to survive to the last of the Boomers and even cover a handful of us Gen-Xers, is there any chance that it will support all of those Millennials? Maybe. But that’s assuming our economy can continue to kick ass. Can it? Maybe, but for how long? Generations of Americans are no longer willing to be margianalized, and diminished. Can they finish their engineering program effectively when they’re fighting for social justice? Millennials, maybe, but they had Boomer parents who could usually cushion their blows. Gen-Z had us Gen-X parents, who came up when Reagan was busy finding new ways to make debt a Conservative Value. So Gen-X, we’re a little skint. Broke. Dimeless, babe. But we got herb, and we got our brains in our heads, still trained on the old Analogue system before Millennials were programmed by computer from birth. We got the analog, so we’ll survive. But can the economy support that many Millennials when they’re no longer productive?
Why worry about that? Just make the Millennials live longer, then raise the Social Security age to 114, bam! Bob’s yer uncle, problem fixed. If any of them happen to make it to 115, hold a big ceremony where you present the unfortunate soul with a big Social Security check for $2,441.32, or six bags of cat food and a copy of People, whichever is worth more at that point inthefuture.com.
Isn’t it good that you and I are friends and not enemies?
So yeah, demographics, not political. But it’s a little political, isn’t it? It’s a show of force in a way, that us lefties can take back our country and then do what? Specifically lefties, do what? What are we going to do? Are we going to invoke the 15th Amendment and find a way to desegregate our economy? Are we going to actually fix the reasons why Elijah and Brionna and Jamarion didn’t even have a chance to fight against a crooked economy like you and I do? That they didn’t get a chance to make a bunch of mistakes in our lives and still end up with a tall-boy and a truck that needs a new sway bar but is still a damned good truck?
It’s political for the lefties because that mask is a show of solidarity against assholes like me. And I’m glad they’re doing it. Because I’m man enough to admit when I can use a little course correction. I’ll still rhyme like Pac and flow like Shock.
They needed to do it, and they are giving up a piece of their future to do this for all of us. Even assholes like you and me who don’t appreciate what they’re doing for us. They have to fix this. We can’t have generations of Americans living in poverty just because someone’s granddaddy had some ideas that we doesn’t share. None of us want protests in Portland. (Though I know the protestors in Portland are getting laid.) But BLM is another thing. Yes, there are anti-fascists in BLM too, and they work hard, we all pick up litter and make a showing. Are we good people? Nah, probably not, but why not line up with BLM when our futures are only slightly less dimly lit as those people in poverty. The BLM protestors are probably not getting laid so much. “Dead Black People” isn’t quite the aphroditiac of Cable Street, and Wearing Our Rosettes, is it there, James Connolly? It’s not. These kids and parents are sacrificing their futures in a way that is just as terrifying as the way we sacrificed our futures to do something that we thought was important. And if it takes a show of force with the facemasks, then so be it. The righties zigged when they should have zagged, they should have latched onto the whole facemask thing in the beginning, now it’s too late, you should have hired Consuela’s mom three months ago to sew you those pretty masks.
Mire, mi comparitos … I hate the mask because I’m an asthmatic, I have weak lungs, and masks just make it harder for me breath. Yeah, I know there are probably some masks out there that are a bit easier to breathe, but it’s basic thermodyamics … reducing the entropy on either side of the mask is going to make heat. And that’s not politics, that’s not even The Constitution, motherfucker, that’s the Third Law of Thermodynamics up in your ass, bitch.
Masks make air harder to inhale, there is no denying that reality. And yeah, in the beginning, I hated the masks because I didn’t like feeling a member of the flock, being herded by a dipshit with a smock. But in time, it kind of gelled into a symbol of social justice. I still took my mask off at the BLM rally for Elijah (and hopefully soon for Jamarion) because I can’t breathe with that fucking thing. We’ve been evolving around viruses and bacteria that are “novel” since essentially the advent of fire in human evolution, so what, about 1.2 million-some years? I’ll agree that there isn’t a whole lot of evolution happening in 15,000-some years since the North American Extinction Event, but in 1.2 million some years, there is going to be a good of evolution. And we’ve evolved around these pathogens. Novel though she may be, SARS-CoV-2 is still just one of Mother Nature’s many ways of telling us to get off her sweet little rock and move somewhere where we can make a mess and don’t contaminate her planet any more than we already have. (Remind me to discuss the opportunity of in-situ leach mining of REEs in National Heritage sites. With 100% truck-in, truck-out solution management, and processing offsite, it can potentially allow millions of acres of highly threatened land in Brazil, Ghana and Canada to be designated World Heritage sites, by replacing the disastrous scars of open-face mining, with solution mining … the near equivalent of taking a polluted coal stove our of your kitchen and replacing it with a natural gas unit … much cleaner, more efficient, won’t destroy the kitchen with layers of soot.)
I’ll live with virus and bacteria and all the stuff that eventually kills a good number of us if we live long enough to be so lucky to be killed by a virus, and not buried in a coffin without a string to a bell to a graveyard shift attendant. If we die, hacking and choking in our final moments, clutching at our co-voided lungs, do you think any of us are going to say “I should have worn the mask!” No, we’re going to think about all the things that have made life so sweet; a pretty girl in an auto parts store, you give her a hug and say “thanks for letting me fix your car” because it really does feel good to work with a machine that is built with logic, structure and neighborliness.
So that’s the difference between me and you. That’s the difference. How you like me now, bitch?