At least one of these links could be Really Valuable.
COVID Crisis II: The Scandal
I think Elon Musk's comments are pretty representative. I don't think people can be blamed for wanting to make, or take, a new vaccine in good faith. I think people can be blamed for imagining that a virus wasn't going to mutate, that slowing the spread of COVID-19 would mean anything but that, by the time a vaccine could potentially have helped people in Texas, that vaccine would be useless in New York. People who had the jab in May and then had Delta COVID in September...had a learning experience, which they might have avoided by precautions as simple as reading this web site.
I think those who mandated that anyone participate in the trials of a whole new form of vaccine deserve more than that little learning experience, although I hope they all had it. All personal health care decisions need to be left to the individual conscience. The idea of trying to mandate anything to keep anyone healthier than person may want to be needs to be recognized as a symptom of a serious mental health problem.
Even children? My life experience contains a teaching story that seems relevant.
During the Carter Administration, my siblings and I had scarlet fever. My brother and I were told we had a rash, but we had good resistance to bacterial infections and the main symptom we noticed was crazy teenage energy. Oh, what fun the first two days of quarantine were--hiking, games, picnics...and then my natural sister had a rash too, and for her scarlet fever was a Real Disease. We spent the next six weeks trying to distract her. This was the child who'd been able to sing on key before she was two years old, the one whose ear for music, and whose cuteness, had been the big attraction of our little family band. When she finally seemed to have recovered from scarlet fever, she whined that music hurt her ears, said she couldn't even hear most sounds in the treble range but felt pain on hearing really high notes, lurched when she walked, and seemed peevish and depressive all the time. Her physical coordination improved as she grew up; her "pitch deafness" and depressive tendencies remained. I wondered why neither our parents nor the doctor had even discussed giving the poor child antibiotics.
A few years passed, and then everyone was talking about this sister's striking resemblance to one of the girls in the Miss America pageant--the winner, Heather Whitestone. Those girls have to do something besides standing around looking pretty, but in most cases the "talent" part of the pageant is a charitable way of saying "At least they'll have something wholesome and chaperoned to do on weekends, if they win the scholarship and go to college." Whitestone danced while deaf, feeling the beat through the floor, and won the contest just for having the fortitude to try that stunt. She went to college, she travelled around inspiring deaf people, she came to Washington and got married and wrote a book. After marriage she was able to recover enough hearing, through expensive and dangerous surgery, to hear her baby cry. And her book mentioned that her hearing loss was blamed, not so much on her having had scarlet fever, but on her reaction to the antibiotics.
You pay your money and you take your choice. Sister heard more of what was going on than Heather Whitestone did. Sister was able to go to regular classes, as a teenager, and play sports. Not everyone who has scarlet fever has any hearing loss at all, nor does everyone who takes antibiotics. Sometimes nobody knows how a "health care" decision will work until it's tried...and sometimes the patient has a preference, which everyone else ought to respect..
Green
What I don't like about this article is that I can't afford to run right out and do it. Maybe you can. If so, please share your results. Natural composting is great for wholesome things like grass cuttings and melon rinds, but we could all be generating electricity from what modern toilets consume electricity to clean and dowdy water-flush toilets dump into the water supply. Sewers are sooo obsolete...by burning sludge we can make power plants obsolete, too, at least for household energy.
Time to throw out the toilets? I don't think so. But no need to dump a tray back into the toilet for another cycle, as I have been known to do when running on solar power alone, because it came out just slightly sludgy. You could dump raw toilet contents into a biogas digester if you didn't mind handling them, but I'd guess that 99% of humankind do.
Poetry
Free verse with Monarch butterflies:
This one might be the best poem of all our first fumbling attempts at flamenca.
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