I guess people can process this in different ways but I just feel really happy. Vaccines are miraculous. Life is short. Nobody is guaranteed any amount of time. Got to enjoy it best we can and make the most of it.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) June 20, 2021

I really like this short thread of Angie’s. And I agree.

Recently my partner and I were in Asheville, NC. I’m admittedly not the most social person in the world, but it was very pleasant to be walking downtown amid the crowds of unmasked and seemingly-happy people. It is nothing like the 1980s was, but there are hints of that feeling here and there, small traces that summon a bit of the spirit of those more-open times. After the trauma and disconnection of the pandemic, more people just start talking to you. There are more friendly smiles. On one trail in the mountains outside of Asheville a woman stopped to chat and was very animated, open and almost effervescent in her joie de vivre. That felt more like how people were during the 1980s than any other experience I’ve had since that time.

There are too many dismal-minded sourpuss killjoys for this flood of the élan vital to truly take off, but there are still enough of the unafraid and the non-zombified to revivify the world a bit. We’re making a roar or two. It’s great in and of itself, but it’s also a wonderful way to battle against the lockdown lifers and the “completely safe” liberal crybabies.

i’ll never forget the hurt in this man’s voice. pic.twitter.com/Ny9jBy2zaD

— Kevin “Glorified Vacuumer” Williams (@GaytonaUSA) June 21, 2021

Also, it should be pointed out that the Cruze was a very successful and well-liked car. It just didn’t make as much $$ as the horrendously-dangerous and gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs it was scrapped to manufacture more of.

We should not have saved GM just so they could forsake manufacturing fuel-efficient vehicles in favor of kid-killing planet-destroying testosterone apocalypses.

We have a higher tolerance for risks that are boring and established — like traffic deaths — than risks that are new and dramatic.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) June 22, 2021

Angie is right. We seem to enjoy running around with our hair on fire about something that’s relatively low-risk to children, meanwhile we continue to do nothing about actual large and persistent risks.

In the end, the response to Covid will harm more people than Covid ever did.

I wanted to buy a mouse I like in lilac, but it’s nearly twice as much as the black version. Whyyyyy?

But it’s pretty:

After my rant below, I thought more about how people do truly seem to enjoy living in fear. It’s not just fear that’s the thing; that might be real or it might be an affectation. What’s beyond the real is the sociality of the fear experience, similar to how a couple might watch a horror movie together to cause them to become physically and emotionally closer.

It seems like now about 25% or so of the population is relying on that pseudo-prosocial shared distress experience for some form of bonding and for a gratification of the need to feel that their life is meaningful and fulfilling. This is a sickness, obviously, and one that will be difficult to eradicate. Just as when one has acquired a taste for some other harmful element, such as heroin or violence, this fear-based pseudo-sociality is and will be extremely addictive. This is the basis of the lockdown worship and the desire to only resume life when everything is deemed “completely safe” (which in reality means never).

I was wrong, mostly, about the hikikomori equivalence. That phenomenon is based on some other lack, some other absence not present in the lockdown lifer types. These new refuseniks are more equivalent to the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, and thus even less interesting and more annoying.

I’m getting tired, but will probably have more to say about that later.

But now is the time to resist these anchorite nutters. Now is the time to lampoon them, to torpedo their lockdown life aspirations, to not amplify their aims, to annihilate their ambitions. They have and will harm more people then Covid ever could and they should be shut down fiercely and unmercifully.

15) It is high time CDC takes decisive action. That’s why @endCOVID19 & @CovidActionGrp are petitioning CDC to “reinstate mask-wearing indoors regardless of vaccine status, guidance for vaccination verification, & resume breakthrough case identification.” https://t.co/rHsTLcrUFY pic.twitter.com/uRo9K5dxwK

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) June 20, 2021

FUCKKKKKKKK that.

What is wrong with this idiot? Of course, he was one of the “inevitable mega-surge of doom” clowns months ago. If you get the Delta variant now, it’s on you because you didn’t get vaccinated. The rest of us should not be forced to live in hell because of the bad decisions of the clueless.

It was extremely premature to end lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing and other health safety measures when the majority of the USA isn't even vaccinated or is anti-vaccine.

— ♡•.•♡ (@IsntDaveOne) June 20, 2021

Lockdowns, after the first month, should’ve not been a thing that happened. “Flatten the curve” is totally forgotten now. These doofuses are going to be advocating for lockdowns a decade from now, for any and every minor threat.

I absolutely refuse to live my life locked down, cowering inside, because some dipshit refuses to get vaccinated. Fuck that and fuck you and go to fucking hell, you miserable shitwweasel. Fuck you so much.

“Going Out” of the Box: Close Intercultural Friendships and Romantic Relationships Spark Creativity, Workplace Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.

Not surprising to me at all. I know it’s firmly against the lib re-segregation urges these days, but you learn so much more and have a vastly better life when you don’t be friends with and date people exactly like you, and in that I include people exactly the same age as you.

What is it with the liberal urge to have life as regimented as army basic training? How the hell did that happen? I remember when it was completely the opposite, and it was not that long ago, either.

The same will hold true for people vaccinated with 2 doses who experience vaccine failure.

Make the population immune without eradication/elimination, and the selective pressure for immune escape is intense.

— Kelly Wind (@kellywind) June 20, 2021

What Kelly says is not wrong, exactly, but it is misleading because it misses vast amounts of complexity and caveats. Certainly, SARS2 having more hosts in which to evolve is not ideal. But the virus, as with all of us, neither has infinite flexibility nor infinite capability to achieve optimum configurations. There are many superior protein arrangements that we can imagine, and many that we might be able to artificially place it (and similar viruses) into that it can never achieve via evolution.

Explaining exactly why would take far too long and most of you would need to read quite a few textbooks before that, but here’s a diagram that relates:

This is much, much simplified, but the virus started at 1, which was metastable (from our perspective). The variants will tend to take it to 3, a stable equilibrium. To go beyond that, there is a much, much harder hill to climb to reach beyond 3, and no natural evolutionary process can do so for the most-optimum configurations.

I think there’s only about a 50% chance I’ll be right, but I expect the Delta variant to be the last or the next-to-last variant to emerge that is significantly more harmful than others. With the number of hosts infected, and the limited configuration space for ACE2 receptor binding, I expect SARS2 is about out of tricks.

As ever, though, time will tell the full tale.

My grip strength is about 3x greater than it was three years ago.

That’s a nice improvement.

Thread: So @ukhomeoffice @UKHomeSecretary – thought you might like to hear this. An 80-year-old UK citizen (my dad) is on day 6 of a hotel quarantine stay at the Courtyard @Marriott at Gatwick: cost £2400. Both him and my mom have been vaccinated. Two negative Covid tests. /1

— Lisa MacLeod (@lisataljard) June 17, 2021

People love prison countries, it appears.

Makes no sense for people who have been vaccinated. And in general is probably not that helpful outside of that (now).

I know a lot of you parochial-ass motherfuckers don’t know anyone outside of your tiny area, but a lot of people have friends and loved ones overseas. Where’s your “open borders” bullshittery at now?